The Nintendo PlayStation is the holy grail of video game collectibles and for the first time ever you just might be able to own one. you have until March 6th to try and nab the world's only known working model at auction and if you're Reading This Article on the day was published the current high bid for this retro prototype is over three hundred thousand dollars plus a significant buyer's premium.
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Now that's a lot of money easily enough to make the Nintendo PlayStation perhaps the most valuable bit of gaming memorable ever.
At one point the high bid for this thing was 30000$ and 50000$ or well over 40000$ dollars with the buyer premium factored in and well before this thing went to auction an unknown benefactor from Norway offered to pay owner Terry Diebold as much as 1.2 million dollars for the prototype though that deal apparently fell through.
But why is it worth that much money? well to answer that we're going to have to look at the drama that brought the Nintendo PlayStation into existence in the first place. Nintendo and Sony are now infamous rivals in gaming but in the 80s their relationship was at least a little less tense.
After riding high on the success of the original Nintendo Entertainment System or the Famicom in Japan Nintendo turned to Sony to develop the audio chip for its next console.
future Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Ken Kutaragi was the one who took up the project designing the new SPC 700 ship in secret, His bosses were apoplectic when they found out but despite the drama, everything worked out well in the end. Because of that Nintendo felt comfortable when Sony and Kutaragi approached them with something more ambitious.
A Super Nintendo with a built-in CD-ROM drive for games. Nintendo agreed which ultimately led to work on two different products - a CD-ROM drive, add-on for existing consoles and the Nintendo PlayStation itself the hybrid console people are now trying to buy for a few hundred thousand dollars. By the time CES rolled around in 1991 Sony was ready to show off its PlayStation prototypes and as the story goes that's when Nintendo pulled off one of the most infamous moves in gaming history.
The very day after Sony revealed its PlayStation prototypes at CES. Nintendo announced that it was working on another CD hardware project with Philips which would eventually become the truly awful CDI. Howard Lincoln than just a senior vice president at Nintendo said the company's engineers reached the quote conclusion that from a technical standpoint it was better for Nintendo to work with Philips's end quote. it's a great story to be sure one full of human drama and backstabbing but it is also far from the whole truth.
An article actually appeared in The Seattle Times confirming that Nintendo was working with Philips on the CDI platform days before the announcement was made on stage. That gave Sony enough of a heads up that then CEO Tenorio oka made some frantic phone calls to try and delay that press conference. At the heart of this beef was ultimately controlled.
Under the terms of the agreement at the time, Sony had the right to sell and profit off of those new CD games leaving Nintendo only the money from cartridge sales. more importantly, Sony also controlled the licensing rights for any game developed for that CD-based system and it was hoping to lean on its other entertainment license to create some really impressive exclusive CD content.
According to the New York Times - Sony plan to release a game based on the Robin Williams movie hook and hinted at another CD game featuring Michael Jackson. Long story short Nintendo had relatively little to gain and lots to lose under the sony agreement. No wonder Philips looks like the better option. For a while, Sony and Nintendo tried to piece together a workable deal but it just wasn't meant to be So, in 1992 Sony gave up on working with Nintendo.
After that very public slap in the face what else was there for Sony to do? its professional pride wounded Sony proceeded to destroy almost all of the Nintendo PlayStation prototypes Build it's own console and spent the rest of the 90s just cleaning Nintendo's clock.
By the time that generation of consoles was being phased out. Sony had sold over 100 million Playstations. Nintendo meanwhile only sold about 32 million courses of its lifespan and things obviously didn't end there.
In March 2000 Sony released a PlayStation 2 in Japan and it went on to become the single best-selling home console of all time and really that's what's so fascinating about this auction. People aren't just bidding on some shelves prototype or a bit of lost history through the Nintendo PlayStation is certainly both of those things. They're bidding on a physical inflection point, a fabled bit of hardware, that had it launched could have led gaming history down a completely different timeline.
Think about it if, Nintendo and Sony were still lucrative business partners. The standalone PlayStation we know and love might never have seen the light of day.
Games like Final Fantasy 7,8 and 9, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Silent Hill, etc in a world where Nintendo got exactly what it really wanted from Sony. we may have never gotten to play and fall in love with these games.
At the very least if they did at some point exist they might not resemble the masterpieces we're used to. this Nintendo PlayStation is, in other words, the foundation of a future that could have been. now the big question is who's going to own it?
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