Nintendo's past partnership with Philips could have turned it into a very different, very weird company

In the early 1990s, Nintendo and tech company Philips collaborated for game releases on an interactive CD player known as the CD-i. This business partnership came in the wake of a failed collaboration between Sony and Nintendo, which historically was the catalyst that led to the creation of the first PlayStation console. But while that was going on, Nintendo licensed some of their franchises to Philips in order to release games for the CD-i. Unfortunately, the reception of the games and the CD-i was less than stellar, which eventually culminated in the unit being discontinued by 1998. Following that, Nintendo would go on to make their own disc-based console with the Nintendo GameCube, but only after years of sticking with cartridge-based releases while their competition moved forward with putting games onto compact discs.