One of Sony’s storied SNES PlayStation prototypes has surfaced, and it’s not sitting on a museum shelf or languishing in one of the company’s cellars.
Instead, the console was spotted in what should have been it’s natural habitat: someone’s home.
Images posted overnight on Reddit, and cross-posted on Assembler Games, show what was at one time a collaboration between Nintendo and Sony: an SNES with a CD-ROM drive called PlayStation.
According to the poster, when the company his father worked for went bankrupt, there was a “box of junk” he was supposed to throw out. One of his co-workers was a man named Olaf who used to work for Nintendo, and the box in question just so happened to contain the SNES PlayStation.
Olaf could possibly be Olaf Olafsson who went on to become president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Inc. Olafsson was involved with SNES PlayStation deal, as well as the first PlayStation console. He is now EVP of Time Warner and a best-selling, award-winning author.
The system was created to play both cartridge and CD games, but it never went into production because at the CES show in 1991, Sony was publicly humiliated by Nintendo.
“At the 1991 CES Sony officially announced the system, only to discover that at the same event Nintendo confirmed that it was working with rival Philips instead. Company president Hiroshi Yamauchi had gone behind Sony’s back at the last minute to broker a deal with the Dutch company. It was one of the most infamous double-crosses in video game history.”
Images of the console have been floating around the Internet for years, but it was thought any SNES PlayStation prototypes still in existence were hidden away someplace. Luckily, this fella has one to call his own, thanks to his father who “never throws anything away.”
You can read up on how the failed Nintendo deal led to the first PlayStation console, through a great piece published by Push Square from 2012.
The full set of SNES PlayStation images are posted over on imgur.
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