nintendo play station

2 Articles

Make Your Own Play Station (The Space Is Important)

January 8, 2024 by 20 Comments

The early history of the Sony Playstation lies in a stillborn collaboration between Nintendo and Sony to produce an SNES with a CD-ROM drive. So the story goes, Nintendo’s Philips deal angered Sony, who decided to make their own console line, and the rest is history. A very small number of prototypes were made, badged as “Play Station,” and should you find one that escaped today, you’re sitting on a fortune. [James] doesn’t have one, but he did have half a Playstation and an SNES shell, so he could make an ungodly child of the two consoles that you can see in the video below the break.

Those Playstation CD-ROM drives were notorious for melting back in the day, so it’s no surprise they’re still for sale today. Thus, he was able to bring the Sony back to life. What follows is an episode of console cutting worthy of a slasher horror movie, as instead of a bit of fine Dremmeling, he brings out an angle grinder and slices away with abandon. We don’t like the Nintendo switch carrying mains voltage, but we’re fine with the PlayStation expansion connector going away. The Nintendo eject button needs a hack to operate the Playstation door open button when pressed. It’s cool to see the board has a mod chip. We used to fit those as a sideline in a previous life. Continue reading “Make Your Own Play Station (The Space Is Important)” →

Ultra-Rare Nintendo Play Station Prototype Hits Auction Block

February 13, 2020 by 26 Comments

If you are interested in such things, you can buy a 1990s Sony Play Station via Heritage Auctions. We’re sure this will have caught your interest, after all it’s not every day you get the chance to catch such a machine. But before you call us out for seemingly reporting the news of an unremarkable sale featuring the runaway success story of 1990s gaming, take a look at the first sentence again. This is not a PlayStation, the ubiquitous grey console of the 1990s, but a Play Station, said as two words rather than one. This ill-fated collaboration between Sony and Nintendo was intended to be an SNES with a CD-ROM drive, but the project faltered and all that remained was the almost mythical tale of a few prototype consoles.

So far there has only been one of these devices that has surfaced, and this is the machine in the auction. So what seemed as though it might be a mundane console turns out to be one of the rarest machines ever created, a true Holy Grail of console collecting.

This machine has a known provenance, and has appeared on these pages before. In 2016 Ben Heck did a teardown to reveal the combination of Sony CD drive and SNES motherboard, and by 2017 he had it working with some homebrew games. There was no official software produced for this console, so it seems the lucky purchaser may have only homebrew games with which to try their console.

At the time of writing the auction is standing at $57,600, and we’d expect this to increase significantly. So you may not have the chance to own the Play Station, but with such a rare machine it’s always worth noting its appearances. It’s also worth remembering that there was more than one of them produced, in fact when your scribe was working in the same industry in the 1990s a senior colleague talked about having been shown one during dealings with Nintendo UK a few years earlier. The machine on sale today may be the only one we know to have survived, but it’s a fair possibility that there are others still gathering dust in long-forgotten archive boxes or collections of gaming hardware junk. Keep an eye out, you might just find your own rarest console ever produced!