I got interested in getting more details about the "humiliating, public fashion" in which the SNES-CD was dropped and found this quite detailed article. In particular it was interesting to read about how not only did Nintendo manage to wiggle out of the contract, they were getting screwed by Sony in an all-too-familiar way:
Sony's Ken Kutagari had bought his children a Famicom and came away unimpressed by the technology. He approached Nintendo with some technology that his company was working on. The Kutaragi-designed sound chip for the Super Famicom would be a key element to the system and was slyly designed in such a way as to make effective development possible only with Sony's expensive development tools.[...]
Sony quickly began development on its home console using the proposed "Super Disc technology". The technology was not scheduled to be released for another 18 months. Sony's console was initially called the "Super Disc", and was supposed to be able to play both SNES cartridges and CD-ROMs, of which Sony was to be the "sole worldwide licenser," as stated in the contract.
[...]
All was looking just fine for Nintendo until it found that the deal they had struck with Sony way back in 1988 granted Sony the right to control and license all the CD-based games for the "Super Disc". Nintendo was now to be at the mercy of Sony and its "Super Disc", which could play SNES carts and Sony-manufactured CDs. Nintendo, understandably, began to get worried.
So basically, the backstory seems to be that Sony managed to do the following:
- Create a chip for a Nintendo system that required developers to pay for Sony tools
- Use a proprietary, Sony-only CD format for the Nintendo CD system so Sony would get a larger share of the profit
- Contract themselves the publishing rights to all of the SNES-CD games so Nintendo would only get the profits Sony wanted them to.
I'm not saying Nintendo did right; the use of lawyers to interpret your contracts is generally a good thing and I hope this taught Nintendo a lesson. It was an interesting article to me though, for now I understand that it wasn't just "technical issues" or "Sony wants to make its own system" that doomed the SNES-CD, it was "greedy businessmen stabbing each other in the back".
(Also Warlock take some notes man people like linked articles better if you show the tl;dr; crew what they are missing. It's nice to have a general summary before you see a gigantic wall of text.)
I think Warlock meant to post this but his fingers slipped and hit Enter before he lost consciousness; this single paragraph from his article has explained more about Kutaragi than anything else I've read:
But in March of 2005, an important shift occured at Sony. It started with the retirement of Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei. Kutaragi, as executive deputy president, had been long-assumed to take the position. Instead, he announced he was stepping down from the position as well as the head of home electronics division. The company then brought Howard Stringer, a Welsh, to run the Japanese giant. The set of moves must have been severly damaging to Kutaragi's ego; a man who redefined the Sony empire being scrubbed for a foreigner. All he had left was his precious PlayStation.
So now I see Kutaragi as kind of childlike; he was high up in Sony and made these electronics that had successful and he felt like he was pretty bad. Then, when the position everyone expects him to get opens up, he is not only passed over but the position is given to someone that is
not Japanese.
I worked for a Japanese manufacturing company for a year, and a few anthropology classes I've taken have touched on this as well: the Japanese culture is very concerned with the notion of the superiority of the "Japanese" race. This was evident every day I worked; it was similar to some kind of TV show where the mother and daughter trick the father into believing something is his idea so he will agree. So I can only imagine that Kutaragi went home and punched some puppies over this. I can now see his consistent over-hype as characteristic of a man who has been shamed and is desperately trying to prove those who shamed him wrong.