10 Most Infamous Unreleased Gaming Consoles

10. Nintendo SNES-CD/Sony Play Station

In terms of sheer intrigue, no piece of vaporware tops Nintendo's SNES-CD. Not only was it hyped up for a long time, but even though it was never actually released, it's incredibly significant historically. The SNES-CD hype came when Sega and NEC were hyping their own CD add-ons for their competitors to the SNES, their Genesis/Mega Drive and TurboGrafx 16 consoles, respectively. NEC made it to the market first by a couple of years, followed by Sega, and and neither made as much of a dent as they would have liked.

Optical discs were clearly the future for delivering games at that point, but as add-on hardware with small game libraries and horrific load times in every title, they weren't especially appealing. Nintendo initially partnered with Sony on their add-on. Various disagreements over the terms of the licensing led to bad blood between the two companies, but they had a deal, so Sony announced a standalone console compatible with the SNES and SNES-CD called the Play Station at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show.

The next day, Nintendo announced a partnership with Philips. It went far enough that some titles were announced, with a few magazines doing previews for a port of 7th Guest, a then-popular PC game. No hardware came out of this deal, either, so only Philips benefited, as they got to use the Mario and Zelda licenses for a few infamous games for their CD-i console, which didn't last very long on its own. In the end, Nintendo didn't touch optical discs until the release of the Gamecube, which used mini-DVDs.