What If the Nintendo Play Station was actually released?

Still image from the Final Fantasy VI Interative SGI demo

Nintendo embraces CDs

One of the biggest mistakes Nintendo made in the co-called 32-bit Era - at least in the opinion of myself and many others, especially on the Internet - was their decision to continue to put their games on cartridges as opposed to discs. From a certain standpoint, you can see why they did: better control over piracy and the failure of the other CD-based add-ons among them. It was a gamble and, in the long term, it didn't really pay off. Traditionally loyal third party publishers left Nintendo in the dust in order to take advantage of the PlayStation's robust CD-based format and ease of programming in their hardware.

If the Play Station had been both released and successful, however, that should have quashed any hesitation the company would have had in using the format for future consoles. And while they may or may not have been able to use the SNES-CD hardware specs for whatever the Nintendo 64 would become in this timeline, they would have enough experience in working with it to at least duplicate it somewhat.

This means that developers like Squaresoft and others would now have an incentive to keep their games on Nintendo hardware - and this tech demo featuring Final Fantasy VI characters on Nintendo 64 hardware might have actually become a real game.