It belongs in a museum!

It belongs in a museum is what I'm saying.

Alright video game nerds, get ready to bid on a legitimate piece of video game history because-sorry, did I say video game nerds? Because I should have said wealthy collectors with enough disposable cash to buy a super-rare game console, keep in in their homes, displaying it to their similarly wealthy friends only to turn around and auction it off in another few years to some other rich collector and so on. Yeah, can you tell I'm a little salty about these kind of things?

But salty or not, someone is likely to pay a preposterous sum of money for the only known Nintendo PlayStation, which has finally gone up for auction. Yeah, Nintendo PlayStation. Did I just blow your mind? No? Oh...that's probably because you don't know-or care-what I'm talking about. But trust me, it's mind blowing. Allow me to nerd'splain.

Gaze upon it and shrug indifferently!

Pictured: business.

Back in the late 80's Nintendo signed a deal with Sony to produce a CD-ROM add-on for the then yet to be released Super Nintendo. As part of the deal there would also be a stand alone console that would play CD-ROMs and SNES cartridges called the Nintendo PlayStation. It even got as far as the prototype stage, but then a day after Sony publicly announced it, Nintendo turned around and announced a similar deal with Philips, a rival electronics manufacturer.

Sony, having had their collective and figurative pants pulled down, turned around and developed their own console, the PlayStation (the one in your closet/attic) and spent the better part of the next thirty years eating Nintendo's lunch.

But not their breakfast, which if you'd ever actually
tasted Nintendo cereal, you'd understand.

Hurry, hurry step right up! See the
 amazing Play Station. You'll swear you
can feel Nintendo's knife in your back!

Through the magic of bankruptcy, a former employee of a defunct banking company got ahold of one of the prototypes as part of an auction for which he paid seventy five dollars. Yes, of money. The man, Terry Diebold and his son Dan, somehow managed to get the console up and running and get this: have been touring it around the world like an olde timey curiosity show taking it to retro game and comic conventions. Cool, but it turns out that's like super expensive and the father and son have decided to auction it off. Which brings us to why collecting is kind of icky.

"You don't know the things we've seen..."

-veterans of the Console Wars

I realize this isn't some lost cultural treasure or Oprah's Klimt. Like in one sense it's a weird, unreleased chimera of a game console and not a single game was ever published for the CD-ROM so it's basically a glorified Super NES. You can pick one of those up in a garage sale for fifty bucks. But as far as anyone knows it's the only surviving example of the most famous betrayal in the video game industry. A yellowed plastic artifact of the grim reality of the console wars.

And now, like the aforementioned Oprah's Klimt, the PlayStation too shall-not the PlayStation 2, the PlayStation also. Where was I? Right. It too may well end up in some rando's private collection, instead of in a museum where future generations can...you know...look at it I guess. Look, I don't know, it just seems like it should be in a museum, ok?

There is one you know, a video game museum? I've been there.
Anyone have a few hundred thousand dollars? I think it's a tax write off.