Nintendo PlayStation Prototype Auction Ends Fetching A Hefty Sum

Last month, an exceedingly rare Nintendo PlayStation prototype went up for auction. Seemingly right away, the top bid amount inflated to nearly $50,000, with the promise of going even higher as more collectors decided to open their wallets. The auction has since ended, with someone offering a whopping $300,000 for it in the end.

With the buyer's premium, the final price of the prototype wound up being $360,000. That's a pretty penny to be sure, but as Polygon points out, that's actually less than the seller and many collectors were expecting it to go for. Indeed, the seller may not be too happy with that final price, considering that they told Kotaku that they turned down a $1.2 million offer from a prospective buyer in Norway.

Whether it's $300,000 or $1.2 million, it was clear that Nintendo PlayStation was going to fetch a significant sum of money at auction. The product of an ill-fated team up between Nintendo and Sony that eventually led the creation of Sony's gaming arm, the Nintendo PlayStation was initially conceived as a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo.

Before Nintendo gave Sony the cold shoulder and penned a new deal with Philips, a couple hundred of these prototypes were created. Given that it's been nearly 30 years since Nintendo and Sony's partnership dissolved, those prototypes are unsurprisingly rare, so the discovery of this one was definitely a big deal.

Of course, the fact that Nintendo broke off its partnership with Sony led to the creation of first PlayStation console, with the brand still going strong today. We'll see if another one of these prototypes surfaces in the future, but given the fact that they were hard to come by decades ago, that may not happen.