Yeah, it's Mega CD, and look at that monster! A 49,800 yen Compact Disc player that you already had to have a Mega Drive to even use when it released in December of 1991. (A far cry from the 2,801 yen I got my used one for recently). Even though the dollar was a little stronger against the yen back then than it is now, that's still the equivalent of almost $400. When it was released as the Sega CD in the US (dropping the Mega in favor of Sega since we didn't have the Mega Drive but the Sega Genesis), it still clocked in at $299. Just looking at that big old original model conjures up memories of store displays for CD-based systems like the 3DO, CD-i, laserdisc players, encyclopedia on disc, tiny little videos playing in postcard-sized windows in the middle of the screen. It's goddamned enormous, it reminds me of a time when the future was COMING, and it was on little lasery platters, like the Huey Lewis and the News one that my parents bought for their new deck and absolutely refused to allow me to touch under any circumstances. But I was pretty sure that CDs would be relevant for me too before too long. Cause Nintendo Power said the SNES-CD was in the works. I had no reason to doubt them, why would they lie?
The SNES-CD is probably one of the more famous pieces of vapor-hardware in gaming history, in no small part due to the fact that Nintendo's development partner—Sony—would famously demand more licensing control than that tight-ass Yamauchi would allow, causing him to secretly negotiate a deal with Philips instead and then blast it right in Sony's face at the 1991 CES the day after Sony showed their hybrid SNES-CD/cartridge system called the "Play Station." The PlayStation of course would later evolve into its own beast and go on to eat Nintendo's lunch for the next ten years. There are plenty of fourth-hand stories floating around about software that made it a good way into development for the SNES-CD before it started to look like the thing would never actually pan out after all, despite going through over 200 prototype iterations.
One of my most favorite bunch of rumors probably deals with Secret of Mana, a game that by all accounts was pretty far along in development with the SNES-CD in mind before Squaresoft made the decision to get it out on a cartridge instead of waiting for the add-on that might never come. Most interestingly, that game's composer, Hiroki Kikuta, just a month or two ago released a CD called Secret of Mana Genesis (no relation to the game console) that featured solely remastered versions of the tracks from the original game, featuring different and improved instrumentation, using the exact same sequencer data that he used when composing the songs back in the early 90s. It is not at all a stretch to assume that we'd have gotten a sort of advanced-synth soundtrack like this had the game actually been released on the SNES-CD as it was planned (and not much more of a stretch yet again to deduce that perhaps the songs were sequenced in this way to support higher-quality instrumentation from the beginning before undergoing their de-rezzing for the SPC 700 chip in the SNES).
But actually, we probably don't have to look much further than the Sega CD to get a feel for what the SNES-CD might have been like had it actually been released. The SNES-CD had an (optimistic) projected release period of almost the exact same time that the Mega CD made it to market, in late 1991, and even though the Mega Drive was definitely older hardware, and we can't predict exactly what kind of licensing standards that Nintendo would have imposed on their third-party developers, it's not an altogether disparate comparison.
I'm sure we'd have seen a variety of "FMV" games like the ones that plagued the Sega CD, especially in the west, with grainy video and low frame-rates. We'd probably have gotten a bunch of RPGs Now With Added Voice Acting and some anime. Maybe some edutainment software? Of course Mario CD. Maybe now-legendary titles like the Final Fantasy games, EarthBound, and other large-world RPGs would have found themselves on CDs instead of silicon.
The SNES-CD actually might have had an overall better chance of taking off though, in both the US and Japan. The Super Famicom in Japan was much more popular than the Mega Drive ever was, so its theoretical CD add-on probably would also have received more support than the niche Mega CD did. The SNES had a more powerful base hardware unit to work with, and had a far more advanced sound chip natively, as well as the ability to push way more colors at a time than the Sega CD ever could, even with programming tricks. Video would have likely been less grainy and sound more realistic (when not just streaming direct redbook audio from the disc). And yet there'd have been plenty of question marks. Would the comparatively slower processor in the SNES have impacted the, well, impact of the CD's showy-ship when it came to fast-paced games? Would they be able to keep costs down and convince parents that an add-on was really worthwhile so soon after upgrading from the NES to the SUPER NES (which didn't even play NES games, itself)? Would the younger-skewed audience of Nintendo products have utterly destroyed the fragile CDs or would we have seen caddies? Ultimately, it's not hard to imagine the SNES-CD running into a lot of the same problems that plagued and eventually torpedoed the Sega CD.
Of course the Sega CD had its gems. Stuff like the aforementioned Snatcher is still classic, while Game Arts made a name for itself with the Lunar games and a variety of companies had success with niche shoot-'em-ups and a couple pretty faithful arcade conversions (Mortal Kombat, Night Striker, and Final Fight CD were all the best home versions of those games for a long time). But there was also plenty of crap, vast killing fields of digital trash, hollow corpses of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, Dragon's Lair rip-offs... and actual Dragon's Lair. Of the 147 games that were ultimately released for the Sega CD in the US you could probably make a list of twenty or thirty that were ever worth playing even in their day, and maybe ten or so that are worth playing as anything more than curiosity now.
Ironically, as we all know, Sega's pursuit of the constantly just-out-of-reach future is what ultimately doomed them, and the Sega CD could probably be seen as the first step into that chasm they'd fall down ten years later with the discontinuation of the Dreamcast. Convincing consumers to support not only their current Sega cartridge system but also their CD add-on spread customers between two platforms despite them technically being one and the same, while Nintendo used the technological limitations (and benefits) of the cartridge format to their advantage. The lack of easy-outs in the form of "enhanced ports," FMV games, sampler CDs, and other enticing "benefits" of CD storage kept Nintendo and other devs on the straight-and-narrow, eventually turning to the on-cart enhancement chips I mentioned a couple weeks ago in order to beef up their games.
Those chips proved so successful in fact that Sega went ahead and released their 32X attachment to enable even better cartridge games for their dying hardware before they could get their Saturn out. Meanwhile, Nintendo, without the benefit of any add-ons whatsoever, absolutely consumed the remnants of the 16-bit market even as the PlayStation launched and started to establish a userbase.
It's kind of interesting to look at the Sega CD as a sort of what-if? when it comes to Nintendo's possible histories. Would they have also faced a fragmentation of the userbase? Their 64DD later on floundered and tanked much harder than the Sega CD ever did, which might not have been such a bad thing after all, since the add-on faded away before it had time to actually build an audience that could have ended up feeling slighted by the tapering-off of support.
And yet, even though it was probably for the better, it's still sort of bittersweet to imagine the kind of totally goofy bullshit Nintendo might have pulled out of their hats if offered that kind of MEGA SHOCK technology and limitless storage space back during the advent of their first real "evolution" era in hardware. Even though I'd have never been able to afford one anyway.