Nintendo PlayStation: Only known version of mysterious console goes on sale

Console is thought to be one-of-a-king

(Heritage Auctions)

You can now buy yourself a Nintendo PlayStation. But only one of them.

The only known version of the mysterious console has been put up for sale in an online auction. It is currently on sale for $48,000 – but it is likely to go much higher.

For a long time, the Nintendo PlayStation was thought of as something between a myth and a joke. While stories of it abounded, there was no known evidence that it actually existed.

Then, in 2015, one surfaced on Reddit. The owners said that it was a prototype of the kind never before seen, the only one of the 200 rumoured to have been made that had survived, and offered a look at it in action.

The Nintendo PlayStation had been found as part of an estate sale, they said. And now it is on its way out into the world, five years on.

The console came about as a collaboration between Nintendo and Sony, with the hope of making a version of the SNES that used a CD drive rather than a cartridge to play games.

The collaboration failed as the pair failed to come to an agreement on licensing deals, and nothing more came from the two companies as they pressed on with their individual consoles, and the PlayStation became the name of a console made by Sony itself while Nintendo made the N64. That meant the one Nintendo PlayStation became perhaps the most rare gaming object in the world.

The console has a traditional disc drive, as well as slots for Super Famicom and Super Nintendo games. But there are no Nintendo PlayStation games that the buyer will actually be able to play, auctioneers say.

"Though the CD-ROM drive was not currently working when it was found in 2009, it has since been repaired by Benjamin Heckendorn, a YouTube personality known for his console repair videos," the listing reads. "It now has the ability to play music CDs like the commercially produced PlayStation, but there is no proprietary software that's known to have been made during the prototype's development."