PLEASE NOTE: If anyone here is unfamiliar with the SNES-CD, please read this article before this blog entry – although I doubt you’d be a hardcore SNES fan without being familiar with that…
This is a question that started to crawl into my head as I started to understand better what the Satellaview did and how it worked. The Satellaview connected to the Super Famicom’s EXT port, like the SNES-CD planned to. The Satellaview streamed high-quality music from a source outside the main SFC hardware, like the SNES-CD planned to. And… well, they both played games, but that’s too obvious.. <_>
So, I started thinking, just how much are the imfamous unreleased CD Add-on and the Satellaview related, and in a manner that’s more than coincidence?
Unfortunately I don’t have all the timeline-stuff quite down here, but I do recall that the SNES-CD was canned quite a bit before the Satellaview was announced.
I kinda have the belief that the Satellaview was hurriedly developed when it was becoming apparent that the SNES-CD was gonna be a no-show. Although there isn’t anything that’d be considered “solid” proof I could find, there are a few things I find interesting when bringing this up in discussion.
First off, a look at the history of St.GiGA on their old webpage. Check out this Jan. 93 listing.
93.1月 任天堂が資本参加
“January 93, Nintendo invests”.
Not particularly sure what that entails, but this is the first reference to Nintendo’s involvement with St.GiGA on the history page. It seems to be right in the midsts of the SNES-CD Drama and 2 years before the Satellaview would actually see release.
Also, Madhatter recently posted this in the BS Zelda forums.
Check out this picture!
For a so-called “SNES-CD”, that sure looks like a Satellaview setup, doesn’t it…?
These kind of things make me wonder, would the Satellaview even exist, were it not for the SNES-CD… well, not existing? This time period is one of the most interesting in Nintendo’s history, because of how many different possible outcomes there might have been…
