The PlayStation brand famously rose from the ashes of a planned collaboration between Sony and Nintendo, and while the Nintendo PlayStation hardware has been thoroughly picked apart in recent years, comparatively little is known about what its software library would’ve looked like. But Sony veteran Shuhei Yoshida has now revealed that the company was working on its own FMV space shooter for the system.
Yoshida joined Sony after the partnership with Nintendo had fallen apart, becoming part of Ken Kutaragi’s team as it was transitioning to work on the standalone PlayStation console. But the fruits of the collaboration with Nintendo were still there to see when Yoshida arrived in February 1993.
“Everybody who joined Ken’s team around that time, the first thing they showed us was that Nintendo-Sony PlayStation – a prototype already working,” Yoshida says in an interview for the MinnMax podcast. “They had almost finished a game on it, and I got to play the game on the system the day I joined.”
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Yoshida describes this game as being similar to the Sega CD version of Silpheed, a space shooter with a faux 3D perspective and FMV backgrounds streamed from the disc. Because the backgrounds were made of pre-rendered videos, Yoshida explains, the canceled game had “richer graphics than the standard of that time.”
Unfortunately, Yoshida doesn’t remember who was leading the game’s development, or even whether it was made in the US or Japan. Sony would ultimately publish a few similar games on the actual PlayStation. It released Philosoma from developer G-Artists in 1995, and Sony subsidiary Psygnosis explored a similar concept with Novastorm a few years prior before that title came to the PS1.
This is a pretty rare insight into what the software library for the Nintendo PlayStation might’ve looked like. Up to this point, Secret of Mana was the best-known game in development for the add-on, and it supposedly suffered quite a few cuts in the transition from CD to SNES cartridge. Who knows what form this space shooter might’ve ultimately been able to take.
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