At the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sony announced a partnership with Nintendo on day one and learned on day two that Nintendo was dumping them for Philips. This episode follows Ken Kutaragi, the Sony hardware engineer at the center of that humiliation, from secretly designing the SPC700 sound chip for the Super Nintendo after watching his daughter play the Famicom, to being saved from firing by opera-singer-turned-president Norio Ohga, to the 1988 SuperDisc contract that Hiroshi Yamauchi realized would let Sony bypass Nintendo's licensing tax.

We cover Sega's board laughing off Tom Kalinske's proposed Sony partnership, the June 1992 boardroom where Kutaragi pitched a million-logic-gate 3D chip and then appealed to Ohga's pride, the exile to Sony Music Entertainment Japan that gave the project CD manufacturing expertise, the ...