Nintendo video game consoles
Although the company had earlier released Color TV Game and Game & Watch, which were their first and second systems respectfully, they did not achieve worldwide success until the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1983. The NES restarted the video game industry after the video game crash of 1983, and was an international success. In 1989, Nintendo released the Game Boy, which became the first handheld console to sell in large numbers. In the early 1990s, Nintendo's market lead began to decrease; although the 1990 Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was a strong seller, the Mega Drive/Genesis was a very strong contender. Nintendo and Sega would both lose a significant portion of the console market towards the end of the 1990s, as Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation became the most popular console, beating the Nintendo 64, though Nintendo managed to sell more than Sega Saturn.
Sega CD
By the early 1990s, compact discs were making significant headway as a storage medium for music and video games. NEC had been the first to use compact disc technology in a video game console with their PC Engine CD-ROM² System add-on in October 1988 in Japan (launched in North America as the TurboGrafx-CD the following year), which sold 80,000 units in six months. That same year, Nintendo announced a partnership with Sony to develop its own CD-ROM peripheral for the Super NES. Commodore International released their CD-based CDTV multimedia system centered in early 1991, while long-in-waiting CD-i from Philips finally arrived towards the end of that year.