Sony's president at the time, Norio Ohga, was so inflamed that he kicked off the PlayStation project as a rival to Nintendo.
When the console was nearly canned again, Ohga refused to let it go because he'd been so humiliated by Nintendo.
Sony now prefers not to include that incident in its official history of the PlayStation. It also leaves out the fact that the console's early designs still included a game cartridge port. Only 200 of these were ever manufactured before the device was redesigned and became the PSX we all know and love today.
In the early days there were hundreds of games that didn't get a release outside of Japan. And some of them were huge, selling more than a million copies each. There are still plenty of games that don't get released here - but over time the big ones have begun to filter through.
When the original PlayStation was released in the 90s, Nintendo didn't have a huge foothold in New Zealand, and Microsoft hadn't yet developed its original Xbox - it didn't come out until 2001. In fact, none of the console-makers were especially popular here with the exception of a couple of Sega devices which were already on the way out.
As a result, PlayStation took off here - everyone had one, even well into the life cycle of the PS2. That's in part because the PSX had an incredibly good game collection to go with it - one that included some of the early Final Fantasy games, Crash Bandicoot, Silent Hill and more.
Sony's grip on the New Zealand market only increased in the year 2000, when the PlayStation 2 was released. This was despite the fact that initially the PS2 was insanely expensive - well over NZ$1000.
While Halo enabled the original Xbox to gain some market share in New Zealand, it was still creamed by the PS2 until the Xbox 360 was released in November 2005. The release caught Sony on the backfoot - the PlayStation 3 wouldn't be released until a year later - and the 360 to gain some traction among early adopters.
But when the PlayStation 4 was released, Sony made certain they weren't caught out by Microsoft again.
It was released in the US days before the Xbox One. It's also been beating the Xbox One ever since - or so we can only assume, given that Microsoft refuses to release sales figures for its latest console (For what it's worth, 30.2 million PS4s have shipped in the past two years.)
And though the current console cycle got off to a slow start, the game catalogue for both consoles is slowly growing, and sales along with them. Not so long ago, many people insisted that this would be the last console cycle gamers would see - but I wouldn't be surprised if PlayStation was still around to celebrate its 30th or even 40th anniversary.
