Sony and Nintendo were on some other sh*t when they got together to make their hybrid console, the Nintendo Play Station back in 1991. And now, rumoured to be the last remaining console, has sold at an auction for USD$ 360,000 (RM1,513,980) to Greg McLemore, founder of Pets.com and Toys.com. Greg McLemore beat out a couple more bidders, and more notably, co-founder of Oculous VR Palmer Luckey. Looks like he wasn’t very ‘Luckey’ after all huh?
The console actually never came to market, and only 200 prototypes were created from the partnership between Sony and Nintendo back in 1991. The relatioship failed however, and subsequently, as per CNN, the rest of the 199 prototypes were ‘believed’ to be destroyed when the deal didn’t go through.
As to how this console was even uncovered, Kotaku reports that in 2009, a man named Terry Diebold ‘unknowingly’ bought the prototype at an auction of abandoned property of a former Sony executive. Polygon reports that this ‘former’ Sony exec was acutally Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Olaf Olafsson, and they both had worked at Advanta Corporation when the company had went bankrupt.
But to our surprise, McLemore actually said that he plans to showcase the console along with the rest of his “collection of 800 coin-operated machines, as well as smaller games, magazines, and art, which McLemore wants to use to create a permanent museum” according to Forbes.
So hopefully, the Nintendo Play Station takes a seat in history, and recognizes that they’re one of the devices which could’ve changed the entire landscape of console gaming, if it had ever gone to market.