There’s an alternate universe where Nintendo and Sony weren’t competitors but collaborators, and for a brief time, it was true. Before there was the Sony PlayStation, there was the Nintendo PlayStation, a CD-based add-on for the SNES. The collaboration went far enough to result in actual prototypes, most of which have been completely lost to time.
One still exists, however, and it just sold for $360,000 at auction.
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The owners of the prototype, according to an interview with Engadget, acquired it for the shockingly low price of $75 through a bankruptcy auction. The person who acquired it didn’t know what it was and tossed it in their attic. Later, the buyer’s son was reading reddit and came across a post talking about the abandoned SNES add-on. That’s when they finally realized what was hiding in that attic. Remarkably, the device still turns on and functions.
The $360,000 paid for the Sony PlayStation prototype far exceeds the already massive $100,150 paid for a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for the NES in 2019.
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