A lost artifact from gaming history has just been sold for an outlandish sum of $360,000: a prototype of the Nintendo Play Station. The unproduced console from Nintendo and Sony, which was uncovered back in 2015 after being tucked away in an attic since 2009, was finally sold at auction yesterday after a three-week-long bidding war.
Before developing the N64 in 1996, Nintendo formed a short-lived partnership with Sony back in 1990 to produce a CD add-on to the cartridge-based Super Nintendo, which later evolved into its own standalone console dubbed the “Nintendo Play Station.” Unfortunately, these plans would later fall apart after Nintendo revealed in 1991 that they were also working with Phillips, a direct competitor of Sony’s, a mere day after the Play Station was unveiled in one of Nintendo's most ill-advised decisions. This led to a falling out between Nintendo and Sony, who would go on to produce the original PlayStation by themselves and enter direct competition with Nintendo’s N64. However, a total of two or three hundred prototypes for the Nintendo Play Station had been produced before this, one of which was taken by original Sony Computer Entertainment president Olaf Olafsson when he left Sony for the ill-fated finance company Advanta.
According to Gizmodo, this prototype eventually made its way into the hands of retired maintenance worker Terry Diebold following Advanta’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy auction in 2009, and it sat in his attic in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for five years until his son Dan pointed out exactly what it was. Since then he’s made several attempts to sell the Nintendo Play Station console, previously turning down an offer of $1.2 million in Norway due to tax concerns before finally scoring $360,000 at Heritage Auctions yesterday. The console is said to be in full working order, and although there are no compatible CD-based games to play it on, it can still play music CDs just fine.
Before the final sale yesterday, the console had been part of a lengthy bidding war over the span of three weeks, with a previous bid of $100,150 being turned down by Heritage Auctions due to being deemed “not bona fide.” Just last year, the Beverly Hills-based auction site sold a mint condition copy of the original Super Mario Bros., one of the most iconic and popular titles in video game history, and the sale of the Play Station has brought them even more attention from the gaming world.
The Nintendo Play Station prototype is a fascinating piece of gaming history, providing a look into what the industry could have been like had the deal between Sony and Nintendo not fallen through. Imagine a world in which Final Fantasy remained a Nintendo exclusive (developer Square Enix famously partnered with Sony for Final Fantasy VII and beyond due to the PlayStation’s superior CD technology), or one where the long-running rivalry between Nintendo and Sega was able to continue without Sony’s PlayStation rising up as a third competitor in the console wars of the ’90s. Indeed, things would have been radically different had the Nintendo Play Station been released, but as it stands now the console serves as an interesting, and extremely expensive, glimpse into what could have been. A glimpse that has just made Terry Diebold $360,000 richer.
Source: Gizmodo