Did You Know Gaming Covers the History of Nintendo’s Canceled SNES CD

Did You Know Gaming’s latest feature tells the story of the SNES CD, an accessory that Nintendo and Sony were developing together in the early 1990s to extend the Super Nintendo Entertainment System’s lifespan by adding CD-ROM features.

Nicknamed the “Nintendo PlayStation,” it was supposed to let the SNES play games from CDs, but it got scrapped right at the end when Nintendo decided to team up with Philips instead. That choice pushed Sony to go off on their own and create the PlayStation we know today.

One of the coolest finds from this project is a working test version that a guy named Terry Diebold stumbled across in 2015. He found it in a box of old stuff from his dad’s job at Nintendo, and this device had both a spot for cartridges and a CD drive. Experts confirmed its authenticity, and it sold at an auction in 2020 for $360,000. Purportedly about 200 of these were made, but most got trashed when the project fell apart.

The SNES CD was Sony’s first foray into video games. They teamed up with Nintendo because a Sony engineer named Ken Kutaragi (who later became known as the “father of PlayStation”) had already helped make the SNES’s sound chip, called the SPC700. The plan was to use Sony’s know-how with CDs, but when it didn’t work out, Sony went off on their own and created the PlayStation.

The regular SNES was a 16-bit system, but the SNES CD was built to handle 32-bit power, either with a better main chip or co-processor. That would’ve made it a lot more powerful than the basic SNES and set it up as a bridge toward fancier, next-level gaming.