Former PlayStation exec: Nintendo left the company “standing at the altar” with SNES add-on, courted Square with whiskey to get Final Fantasy 7 off N64
If there’s one prominent thing we know about the history of gaming, it’s the partnership that nearly happened between Nintendo and Sony for a SNES add-on capable of playing Super Discs, a type of CD-ROM. Despite the two sides coming extremely close to an agreement, Nintendo pulled out at the last second. Sony would then go on to form its PlayStation brand while Nintendo teamed up with Philips for a short period.
Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden reflected on that bit of history in a recent interview. He said that Ken Kutaragi, who was an engineer and later became Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO, was left “proverbially standing at the altar” due to Nintendo’s decision.
Layden told Eurogamer:
“Obviously, we were going to build – or rather, we built – an optical drive peripheral for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo realized cartridges had already maxed out their memory footprints and so we – or rather, Ken Kutaragi – created the compact disc technology to support the SNES. And we were just about ready. I think it was at CES [Computer Entertainment Show] 1993, we were going to announce the partnership. And Nintendo left us standing at the altar, after they did a pivot at the last minute and went with Philips.
So there was Ken, proverbially standing at the altar with his optical disc drive in his hands. And, indignant, he went back to the leadership at Sony at the time and said: ‘All I need is an OS and some more connecting tissue for this thing, and we can build our own game machine’.”
Another important piece of history concerns Final Fantasy 7. Up until that point, the series was on Nintendo. However, starting with Final Fantasy 7, the series shifted consoles to PlayStation – and that title never made it to the N64. In fact, it wasn’t until Switch that the game – as well as other entries in the RPG series – finally appeared on an Nintendo platform.
Layden said the following about how Sony got Square on board for Final Fantasy, which involved… whisky. He explained:
“When they (Sony) decided they were getting into the game business, they knew they had the technology, the engineers. But they said ‘let’s be honest, we sell electronics’. Sony knew that without entertainment DNA, we would not be successful.
They’d look at the Nikkei paper for 45 minutes, drink a cup of tea, and then go: ‘alright, lunch’. So the initial stage was made a joint venture between Sony Electronics and Sony Music. Half the company was from the music side and, well, you could see it on the shop floor at 8am. All the hardware engineers were at their desks wearing their Sony vests, working on their engineering thing. And then around 10 through 11am, all the Sony Music guys would come in – hungover, sunglasses, cigarettes hanging out their mouths. They’d look at the Nikkei paper for 45 minutes, drink a cup of tea, and then go: ‘alright, lunch’. They’d all stand up. They’d all leave.
We wouldn’t see them again for the rest of the day, because Sony Music populated sales, marketing, advertising, publisher relations. So those were the guys who would go out with the people at Square and ply them with whiskey until the wee hours of the morning to finally get Final Fantasy 7 off of Nintendo and onto PlayStation. When that announcement was made, that was really the ‘oh my god’ moment. ‘Sony’s really serious about this now.’ And that’s down to the music guys, the doggedness of just trying to get a deal over the line. They were amazing.”
