Former PlayStation exec says Nintendo cancelling SNES PlayStation add-on was “almost helpful”

Shuhei Yoshida, previously a PlayStation executive who worked at Sony for many years, has weighed in on the cancelled SNES PlayStation add-on.

Many know about those details at this point. During the SNES era, Nintendo and Sony were talking about a CD attachment that would have worked with the console. Nintendo essentially bailed at the last minute, with Sony moving on to do its own thing in the gaming space.

Yoshida said in an interview with GamesIndustry that the deal not happening “was almost helpful that Nintendo cancelled the project”. This is because “the Sony team would have been stuck as part of a Nintendo system.”

Yoshida also shared a few words about the device in general and how Ken Kutaragi – then the head of the PlayStation group – invited him to play the original PlayStation prototype:

“He had multiple units of the final working prototypes. The system was already done and almost ready for manufacturing, and a few games were already finished. I played one game that was a space shooter, but still it was based on Super Nintendo tech, right? So it was limited.”

Yoshida said the add-on was similar to the SEGA CD add-on for the SEGA Genesis. This let huge amounts of data to be streamed direct from the CD. However, it was limited by the technical constraints of the 16-bit hardware.