10 Worst Mistakes Ever Made By Video Game Companies

The games industry is defined as much by blunders and disasters as it is by progress and innovation. In fact, the two kind of go hand-in-hand, as disagreements between video game companies have often led to the creation of groundbreaking new consoles, or decisions to impose dodgy DRM rules have been shot down so hard by the community that it set a precedent for future generations.

Not all mistakes made in the industry eventually work out for the best though, and while we can always hope that the perpetrators 'learned their lessons', it hasn't stopped consoles from tanking, studios from going under and - in the most extreme case - the entire industry from collapsing.

Yes, really.

Here are 10 historically huge blunders that ended up costing their companies dearly, alongside reshaping the games industry in the process.

The tale of how the Sony PlayStation came into existence never gets old, and there's just something endlessly amusing about the fact that Nintendo let the PlayStation brand slip through its fingers.

Yes, the now-legendary PS1 was initially conceived as a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo - the kind of collaboration that would be unthinkable today. In their haste to make this thing happen, Nintendo gave Sony full control of the software licensing for the CD part of the console, so effectively we'd have had a Franken-console whose cartridge games were overseen by Nintendo, while its CD games were in Sony's hands.

The Nintendo PlayStation was unveiled by Sony at CES in 1991. It seemed that all engines were go, and that we'd see the collaboration realised. But at the same event, Nintendo shocked the world (and particularly Sony) by announcing that the SNES-CD would indeed be happening, but with Philips - Sony's long-time rival - manufacturing it.

It was completely out of the blue, as if Nintendo had only just realised that it signed away control most of its control over to Sony and thought 'Nope, not happening'. Whatever the reasoning, the Nintendo Play Station was no more.

So Kutaragi convinced Sony to make their own console, and, well, we know the rest...