In 2020, a prototype of a Nintendo PlayStation game console that never entered the market was sold for $360 thousand. Now, at Heritage Auctions, a gamepad for this device was sold for $35 thousand. That’s a staggering amount of money for an item that looks like a Super Nintendo controller, but with Sony and PlayStation logos on the body.
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In the early 1990s, Nintendo announced a partnership with Sony. The companies planned to create a game console that could work with both Nintendo cartridges and Sony CDs. At the time, discs were considered a cutting-edge device because they offered more than 100 times more storage space than traditional cartridges.
However, the collaboration did not last long and Nintendo eventually pulled out of the deal and partnered with Philips in the project to create the doomed Philips CD-i. At the same time, Sony continued to independently develop the PlayStation console. However, the Nintendo PlayStation console has reached the prototype stage and has become an extremely rare and expensive collector’s item in recent years.
A few years after the end of the partnership with Nintendo, the PlayStation logo was finalized, and Sony’s first and second generation consoles quickly surpassed Nintendo’s devices. As for the Nintendo PlayStation prototypes, 200 copies were produced, most of which were destroyed when the companies stopped working together. Therefore, each surviving prototype is of great value to collectors.