All aboard... PlayStation

But Nintendo's efforts were becoming an irrelevance. In December 1994, Sony made its long-threatened entrance into the arena. Once to have been a joint venture with Nintendo, the PlayStation was to inflict a fatal wound on the SNES.

The PlayStation ditched cartridges and paired a 'next generation' graphics processor with a CD-ROM drive. Software developers applauded. Freed from the shackles of Nintendo's totalitarian cart manufacturing terms they'd be able to make a packet selling games on cheap-to-produce CDs. 250 of them signed on the dotted line. Among them were Namco, of whom Nintendo had made an enemy years beforehand, and who welcomed the PlayStation into the world with Ridge Racer.

The SNES was butchered in its bed as the PlayStation conquered Japan, then America, then Europe. Sega parried bravely with the Saturn, but no-one took them seriously any more. Only a new Nintendo machine could stop Sony.

The Nintendo 64 would double the stakes again, they said, with 64bit power, Silicon Graphics hardware and a 'special' controller. It sounded good. And it was good - when it finally appeared, 18 months after the PlayStation. By then the war had been lost. Super Mario 64 was an amazing game, but it was one of too few produced by Nintendo's own hard-pressed coders. And too many key third-party publishers had by then rallied behind Sony.

The spirit of the SNES lives on in superb N64 games like Zelda 64, ISS 64 and the incredible GoldenEye 007. But Nintendo's days of dominance are over. If their next console is to have a chance against Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2 it will have to win the support of developers in the new, peaceful, democratic gaming world.