Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System launched in Japan on the 21st of November 1990. Nintendo deployed 100 trucks to ship 300,000 units late at night under the codename Operation: Midnight Shipping to prevent yakuza interference.
Sony and Nintendo formed a secret partnership to design the Super NES sound chip and prototype the PlayStation console. Ken Kutaragi developed the S-SMP audio subsystem and a CD-ROM drive prototype before Norio Ohga canceled the project, leading Sony to create the PlayStation independently.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System lost the console war because its strict censorship policy prevented the release of the uncensored version of Mortal Kombat. The Genesis version outsold the censored Super NES version by a ratio of nearly three to one due to the availability of blood and fatality moves.
Donkey Kong Country saved the Super Nintendo Entertainment System by selling 6.1 million copies in the last 45 days of 1994. The game utilized pre-rendered 3D models on Silicon Graphics workstations to rival 32-bit systems and became the fastest-selling video game in history at that time.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System remained competitive through 16 additional pins on the cartridge card edge that allowed for special coprocessor chips. These chips included the Super FX RISC CPU for 3D polygonal graphics and the Nintendo fixed-point digital signal processor for vector-based calculations.
Approximately 49.1 million Super Nintendo Entertainment System consoles were sold worldwide. The sales breakdown includes 23.35 million units in the Americas and 17.17 million units in Japan.