What may be the rarest video game system of all time has just been sold for $360,000.
An auction for the “Nintendo Play Station”—perhaps the only remaining unit of its kind—ended on Friday after attracting 57 bids. That $360,000 is a nice haul for a product that was initially attracting bids in the $15,000 to $45,000 range before soaring to a quarter of a million dollars in mid-February.
Among the participants was Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey, who famously sold off his business to Facebook for $2.3 billion. “I am currently the highest bidder on this,” he tweeted on Feb. 13. “Who are the other nutters who keep bidding against me?”
So who won the auction? Unfortunately, Heritage Auction says the winning bidder wishes to remain anonymous. But they now own a piece of gaming history from the early 1990s, when Nintendo and Sony were briefly developing a new video game console together.
The result was the Nintendo Play Station, a hybrid system that could play existing Super Nintendo cartridge games, along with CD-ROM games supplied by Sony. The product was announced in 1991 at CES, but the partnership between the two companies quickly fizzled over Nintendo’s concerns that Sony had been granted too much control over the system’s software licensing.
In the end, 200 prototype units of the Nintendo Play Station were created, but never released to the market. All are believed to have been destroyed, except for one, which was kept by former Sony Computer Entertainment President Olaf Olaffson.
Despite the passage of time, the Nintendo Play Station that was up for auction still works. It can play old SNES cartridge games, and the CD-ROM drive can play music tracks from CDs.
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