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“Under the deal, Philips technology will be used to produce an add-on device for Nintendo game players, allowing them to use optical compact disks,” the New York Times reported at the time. Sony, meanwhile, had “announced an arrangement with Nintendo under which Sony will introduce a machine called the Game Player.” It wasn’t immediately clear what was happening. Even executives from Sony, questioned by the Times, seemed bewildered.

Nintendo had pursued Sony, aggressively, to work with them to develop a new console that could use compact discs instead of the cartridges familiar from its Super Nintendo Entertainment System; they had consented to the deal, if somewhat reluctantly, and had been working on the hardware under the terms of a contract agreed to by both parties. Sony’s executives turned up to the Consumer Electronics Show expecting to listen to Nintendo’s promised presentation of the partnership. When Sony’s then-president Olaf Olaffson heard Yamauchi announce on stage that Nintendo would be working with Philips, it was the first he had heard of it. “We view this as a very serious matter,” was all he could tell stunned journalists after the announcement. He said it was “not clear” whether Nintendo had breached their contract.

Some time before the Consumer Electronics Show, Nintendo had suddenly and inexplicably stopped communicating with Sony about the console the two companies were meant to be collaborating on. In an obituary for Wired magazine published shortly after Yamauchi’s death, a long-time friend and colleague of the Nintendo president remembered hearing that Sony’s engineers were left “in limbo without Nintendo’s cooperation” on the design and manufacturer of the machine. Asked to step in and investigate, he found the issue was a dispute over terms: “According to the contract, Sony could make and sell CD-ROM games without buying them from Nintendo. Nintendo wanted a monopoly on manufacturing games for its hardware.”