Fourth generation of video game consoles
Nintendo executives were initially reluctant to design a new system, but as the market transitioned to the newer hardware, Nintendo saw the erosion of the commanding market share it had built up with the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo's fourth-generation console, the Super Famicom, was released in Japan on November 21, 1990; Nintendo's initial shipment of 300,000 units sold out within hours. The machine reached North America as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System on August 23, 1991, and Europe and Australia in April 1992.
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.