I have forgotten the source, but in one Sony interview last week, they said that during the PSOne era, they thought of Sega not as a rival, but as comrade-in-arms during the console race of that time.
Of course we knew what happened. Nintendo chose a different path with the Nintendo 64. PSone became THE console of the era, and whatever happened to the Saturn.
Where did the comrade idea happened?
Looks like it happened years later, right after Nintendo chose Phillips over Nintendo to manufacture their CD-addon and before Sega chose to go with the Saturn. This straight from the mouth of Tom Kalinske, Sega of America’s former CEO.
“They had wanted Nintendo to use some technology that they had, and Nintendo instead chose to work with Philips. That really annoyed Sony. Olaf Olafsson [Sony Electronic Publishing President] and Micky Schulhof [President of Sony America] came to my office and said: ‘Tom, we really don’t like Nintendo. You don’t like Nintendo. We have this little studio down in Santa Monica [Imagesoft] working on video games, we don’t know what to do with it, we’d like Sega’s help in training our guys. And we think the optical disc will be the best format.”
And then the relationship became closer:
“So our relationship with Sony was very close and very tight. We together worked a lot of these things out. And Sega of America and Sony were both convinced that the next platform had to use optical discs. We had been working on this CD ROM attachment to the Genesis [Mega CD], which we knew really wasn’t adequate, but it taught us how to make games on this format.”
Everything was supposed to fall into place. Kalinske only needed one thing the board’s approval, who vetoed the idea. And that’s where it started to end.
“Next we went to Nakayama [Sega President] and the Board at Sega, and they basically turned me down. They said: ‘That’s a stupid idea, Sony doesn’t know how to make hardware. They don’t know how to make software either. Why would we want to do this?’ That is what caused the division between Sega and Sony and caused Sony to become our competitor and launch its own hardware platform.”
In a way, who knows what could have happened if the joint venture did happen. In an alternately reality, we would have been all playing the Sega Playstation 4. Instead, everything went down for Sega when in E3 1995, Sony announced that the PlayStation will be priced $299, compared to the Saturn’s $399 and an on-the-day launch.
Source
Source:
http://ift.tt/1yEFyGP