Long story short, Nintendo didn't think through a contract with Sony by Hiroshi Yamauchi, then-president of Nintendo. The contract gave Sony all profits for a potential CD-ROM add-on which was being developed by Ken Kutaragi. Yamauchi didn't like the deal, but instead of telling Sony that and drawing up a new contract, he instead went with Phillips to develop an alternative CD-ROM add-on for the SNES... a deal which also imploded (resulting in Phillips' split with Nintendo for their own standalone CD-ROM "multimedia" set-top, the CD-i; a messy legal battle also gave Phillips the rights to some of Nintendo's franchises, resulting in the infamous Zelda and Mario CD-i games), and caused Nintendo to spurn both the 32-bit era and the CD-ROM format. Sony, meanwhile, was reluctant to get into gam