No Longer An Urban Legend: The Nintendo PlayStation Console Is Real

It’s no secret that at one point in time, Nintendo and Sony were collaborating on a console. Ultimately, Sony’s demands didn’t suit the big N, so both companies parted ways. Nintendo then worked with Philips to produce a CD-ROM based console, but that also fell through. What we ended up getting was the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, a console that became the best-selling of the 16-bit era despite the hurdles leading up to its launch.

After both Nintendo and Sony went their separate ways, the latter decided to spite the former and release its own console, despite having no experience in the market. The rest, as they say, is history. The Sony PlayStation became an incredible success. In the first nine years of its life, it sold over 100 million units.

While that story is interesting, here’s something more so: upwards of 200 prototypes were created of the “Nintendo PlayStation”, a console that allowed both cartridges and CD-ROMs to be used. The sad thing, though, is that despite that rather large number, seeing proof of one has been rarer than spotting a dodo. Until now, that is.

The folks at Engadget learned that two lucky owners of a prototype, Terry and Dan Diebold, would be showing it off at a retro gaming expo in Hong Kong, so they paid a trip to get a good look at it, and also learn a bit about how it wound up in their hands in the first place.

As it happens, former Sony CEO Olaf Olafsson was a board member at the company Terry worked for, and thanks to a company bankruptcy, he was able to score a lot of loot for a modest amount of money. Within one of the boxes was one of the rarest consoles on the planet.

After much care was taken to make sure that there were no hardware security mechanisms on the console, it was turned on, and ultimately opened up. Unfortunately, only the cartridge portion of the console works, and it’s currently unknown whether the optical drive fails to work because the firmware isn’t fully there, or because there’s a hardware malfunction.

Either way, even with the console in the state it’s in, it’s seriously cool, and a dream item for any serious video game collector. Now if only the other 199 or so prototypes would rise to the surface!