WiiNintendo

We know about Nintendo and Sony working together well over a decade ago, but I guess Sony also had talks with Sega.

We’ve always known Sony and Nintendo were in serious talks about releasing a CD expansion for the SNES, which could have easily lead into a joint collaboration on a future platform. What wasn’t so well publicized, however, was similar discussions between Nintendo’s hardware rival at the time, Sega.

Fan website Sega 16 recently conducted an extensive interview with former Sega president Tom Kalinske, where he discussed his often frustrating dealings with Sega of Japan (how they vehemently opposed packing in Sonic the Hedgehog with the Genesis), what the company mindset was during his tenure (what the heck was up with Sega CD, for example) and most importantly, how close Sony and Sega came to working together.

As it turns out, not very. Kalinske worked with Sony to develop a proposal for developing Sega’s next hardware platform, which was then taken to Sega of Japan. “Sega said not a chance. [his emphasis] Why would it want to share a platform with Sony? Sega would be much better off just developing its own platform, and it’s nice that we had some ideas on what that platform ought to be and they’d consider it, but the company would be developing its next platform itself,” said Kalinske.

Sega said not a chance. Why would it want to share a platform with Sony?

“Now, at that particular point in time, Sega knew how to develop software a hell of a lot better than Sony did,” he continued. “They were just coming up the learning curve, so we would have benefited much more greatly — at least in my opinion — than Sony would have, at least initially, at least for a year or two. But Sega of Japan didn’t want any of that.”

Nintendo and Sony’s dealings went much further, eventually leading to a working prototype that would serve as the basis for developing the original PlayStation. It’s interesting, however, to see how different the videogame industry could have been if either company had a little more hindsight.

There’s plenty of other interesting comments in the interview, so make sure to read on.

http://wii.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3152075