Nintendo PlayStation prototype discovered

A Reddit User posted pictures (currently unreachable due to protests on the site) of the supposed console and had a story to match.

The person who stumbled upon this rare treasure, Imgur user DanDiebold, explained that the box of junk he found belonged to his dad, who at one point worked together with a ex- Nintendo employee named Olaf.

This is exceedingly rare: It’s a prototype of the SNES-CD console, which was initially created as part of a proposed partnershp between Nintendo and Sony over a quarter-century ago.

Pictures claiming to depict Sony and Nintendo’s prototype SNES PlayStation have appeared online.

Fearing how much licensing control it was signing over to another firm, Nintendo secretly cut a deal with Philips instead, and revealed the SNES-CD attachment at CES 1991, only a day after Sony unveiled its own “Play Station” with SNES and CD slots. “It was one of the most infamous double-crosses in video game history”. The console was widely successful commercially, with more than 100 million units sold worldwide, providing serious competition to Nintendo’s own N64 which only managed to sell 32.9 million units worldwide.

As many longtime gamers may or may not know, the original PlayStation only launched after Nintendo backed out of a planned partnership with Sony. Now a fan has discovered a piece of gaming history in the form of an actual dev kit for the Nintendo PlayStation console. Diebold says he hasn’t had a chance to try and boot the system up as he doesn’t have a power cord for it, but that it looks like it takes a common DC cable.

In 1994 Sony released its PlayStation, sans Nintendo and continues to be among the dominants names in the gaming industry even to this date. CD-ROMs were futuristic, but Nintendo wanted to future-proof its game console – so Nintendo wanted Sony to contribute a CD-based game insert so as to encourage CD-ROM usage after cartridges became officially outdated in the game scene. Terry carefully kept all that he could lay his hands on from old jobs and that included the prototype of the Nintendo Play Station.

The console, never released to the public, only exists in early prototype form.