On Friday, March 6, the auction for the ‘Nintendo Play Station’, believed to be the last copy from a time when Sony and Nintendo ever worked together, went under the hammer for $360,000.
It is a device that Sony and Nintendo developed together and that should be able to read both CD-ROMs and Super Nintendo cartridges. The console yields about 319,000 euros. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had thrown himself into the fray to get his hands on the piece of video game history, but his maximum bid of $236,000 wasn’t enough. The winner, according to CNN Business, is Greg McLemore, a collector who made his money during the dot-com boom and is the founder of Pets.com and Toys.com.
The Nintendo Play Station only works partially. Super Nintendo cartridges will work, but the CD-ROM part will not work for the most part. The CD drive can run with a special cartridge, but it doesn’t like PlayStation games. However, there is also an emulator of the Nintendo Play Station, for the CD part, and a game made for that, the well-known engineer Ben Heck managed to get to work.
Its owner was Terry Diebold, who got his hands on the device through an auction when the company he worked for went bankrupt in 2009. That company’s CEO, Advanta Corporation, was Olaf Olafsson, and he was the CEO of Sony Computer in the past. Entertainment, when Sony and Nintendo made the prototype. Diebold told Kotaku that he once declined a $1.2 million offer for the console.