Nintendo disagreed, believing that CD-ROMs were too slow, but agreed to allow Sony to design the add-on after Kutaragi claimed the drive would be used for everything but games.

To counter the proposed agreement, Yamauchi sent Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa and executive Howard Lincoln to the Netherlands to negotiate a more favorable contract with Philips.

As David Sheff said in his book Game Over, "[The Philips deal] was meant to do two things at once: give Nintendo back its stranglehold on software and gracefully f--k Sony.

"[12] At the June 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, Sony announced its SNES-compatible console based on both cartridge and CD, called the PlayStation.

In 1992, a deal was reached allowing Sony to produce SNES-compatible hardware, with Nintendo retaining control and profit over the games.

The prototype was reportedly abandoned by former Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson during his time at Advanta.

[20] In March 2016, retro-gaming website RetroCollect reported that it (and influential members of online emulation communities) had received (from an anonymous source) a functional disc boot ROM for the SNES-CD.

[22] Heckendorn later identified faults in several on-board components which he subsequently replaced in 2017, resulting in fixing the audio and CD drive issues indirectly.

[30] The specifications of the prototype are different from that of the proposed add-on by Philips, which were published in the March 1993 edition of Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM).

This contract provisioned Philips with the right to feature Nintendo's characters in a few games for its CD-i multimedia device, but never resulted in a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES.

Meanwhile, Sony then entered a short-lived alliance with Sega, where it was agreed that both companies would share all costs and risk for the new CD-ROM drive, and ultimately the next generation console.

The main game in development for the SNES-CD platform launch was Square's Secret of Mana, whose planned content was cut down to the size suitable for cartridge and released on that medium instead.

[35][16] Nintendo, still convinced of the faster load times and stronger anti-piracy of the cartridge, did not release an optical disc-based console until the GameCube in 2001.