If you werenât aware of a gaming console called the âNintendo PlayStationâ then you arenât entirely wrong as it never officially launched. It is perhaps the rarest gaming console on earth. It was a prototype developed by Nintendo and Sony but never saw the light of the day as Nintendo betrayed the Japanese company and opted to use a Phillips CD Drive on the base for the Super Nintendo. It was quite a fiasco as Sony announced their partnership, Nintendo announced plans to bring a CD Drive with Phillips the very next day. 

© Nintendo/Sony

There arenât many prototypes of the Nintendo Playstation out there and this particular one sold for $360,000 (INR 2,66,38,920.00) at auction. Thereâs a good chance that this is the only unit in existence as only 20 were made. It attracted around 57 bids that ranged from $15,000 to $45,000 before reaching the magic number of $360,000. 

Amongst the people who placed a bid on the console was Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey, who sold Oculus to Facebook for $2.3 billion. âI am currently the highest bidder on this,â he tweeted on Feb. 13. âWho are the other nutters who keep bidding against me?â

© Twitter

We donât know who won the auction as the bidder has asked to remain anonymous. However, the person now owns one of the rarest gaming consoles on earth from the early 1990s. The console is rumoured to play both SNES cartridges and CD-ROM games, however no games were launched that worked on the console. Having said that, the console does work as it was tested by the auctioneers with a SNES Mortal Kombat cartridge and the disc drive can also play audio CDs. 

The Nintendo PlayStation was announced in 1991 at CES, however the partnership fell through as Nintendo was concerned that Sony had been given too much control over the systemâs software licensing.

View the full article