The Japanese company is responsible for a variety of consoles, including a prototype that would change the home console market forever.
Between the Color TV-Game, Nintendo’s first home console from 1977, and the Switch 2 announced in 2025, the Mario and Co. group has brought a lot of hardware to market. But as interesting as Nintendo’s history is, one of the most important stories is about a device that never appeared: The Nintendo Playstation
A Burst Deal
At the end of the 80s, discs were becoming more and more popular as a storage medium for video games, and Nintendo also wanted to get on board with this technology. Together with Sony, an extension for the SNES, known in Germany as Super Nintendo, was to be developed.
Development of the add-on with CD drive began in 1988 at Sony and was announced on June 1, 1991 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. One day later, Nintendo announced that the extension would be developed with Philips. “A slap in the face for Sony,” as the New York Times titled shortly afterwards.
Part of the agreement between Sony and Nintendo was that Sony itself was also allowed to develop a home console that was compatible with both Sony’s Super Discs and Nintendo’s SNES cartridges.
There is currently only one known prototype of this Nintendo PlayStation, which sold at auction in 2020 for $360,000. The following Reddit post shows a picture of exactly this console:
The only known Nintendo PlayStation prototype which sold for $360,000 in 2020 ☻ The former owner of the Nintendo PlayStation, Terry Diebold, bought the rare console in 2009 with a box of old belongings from a former Sony employee for $75.
The other side of the deal.
byu/MarineKingPrime_ inplaystation
Nintendo itself did not launch the first console with a disc drive until 2001, a year after the release of the PS2, with the GameCube.
