Nintendo 64

In the early 1990, with the success of the NES and Super Nintendo consoles, the Nintendo company dominates the world video game market, despite the frantic competition that Sega delivers. The emergence of the CD-ROM led Nintendo to enter into a partnership with Sony to develop a CD player for the Super Nintendo, the SNES-CD, to compete with the NEC PC-Engine and Sega Mega-CD. But a dispute brings Nintendo and Sony to abandon their joint project, which Sony recycles then to develop its own console, the PlayStation. Nintendo then turns to the Dutch firm Philips to continue its project. The announcement of the PlayStation in 1991, coupled with the failures of the Sega Mega-CD and the Philips CD-I, persuaded Nintendo to bury the Super Nintendo CD-ROM extension permanently and to turn to the development of a brand new console.