Nintendo PlayStation The Prototype That Started a War
In 2009, a bankrupt credit card company clears out its offices. An employee walks away with a $75 box of junk nobody wants. Inside, though he has no idea, sits a console almost no one has ever laid eyes on. An urban legend. It’s a Nintendo PlayStation: the prototype of a CD-equipped SNES, born of an alliance with Sony that Nintendo shattered, loudly and publicly, in 1991. The unit was thought to be the only one in the world, until a second surfaced in 2025.
- Cartridge slot, on top: Super Famicom and Super Nintendo games. Here, a Japanese copy of Street Fighter II Turbo.
- “PlayStation,” one word, model number SFX-100. The Nintendo name appears nowhere on the console.
- CD tray, up front: discs in the Super Disc format.
- The controller: a Super Nintendo shell with Sony PlayStation markings.
Nintendo PlayStation: the broken alliance
Chicago, Saturday, June 1, 1991. Sony unveils a console that plays both Super Famicom cartridges and a brand-new CD format. Within 24 hours, the Nintendo PlayStation will be dead and buried. Because the very next day, Nintendo announces that its CD drive will be built with Philips after all. Sony, its partner for three years, is dumped in public; the press will call it one of the greatest betrayals in video game history. To understand how it came to this, you have to go back to a sound chip.
I · 1988 – 1990Two giants join forces
In the mid-1980s, Sony doesn’t make consoles and has no desire to: as far as its executives are concerned, video games are toys. The company sells televisions, Walkmans, MSX computers, and compact disc players, a format it invented with Philips in 1982.
One of its engineers, Ken Kutaragi, watches his daughter play on a Famicom and decides Sony belongs inside that box. Out of that conviction comes the SPC700, a sound chip he designs for the upcoming Super Famicom. That chip is Sony’s foot in Nintendo’s door.
Starting in 1988, the two companies discuss a far more ambitious project. The joint development contract is finalized in early 1990, according to Sony’s official corporate history, and signed by Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. Sony will build a CD-ROM drive for the Super Famicom, plus a hybrid console sold under its own brand, one that plays Nintendo’s cartridges as well as discs in a new format, the Super Disc. That hybrid machine is the one that will come to be known as the Nintendo PlayStation.
For Nintendo, it’s the answer to NEC’s PC Engine CD-ROM², released in Japan in December 1988; Sega will follow with the Sega CD three years later. For Kutaragi, it’s the way in: Sony will finally have a console with its name on it.
II · 1990The fox in the henhouse
Hiroshi Yamauchi doesn’t know it yet, but he has just made an enormous mistake. To understand which one, you have to know how Nintendo makes its money. Since the NES, not a single game has shipped on its consoles without its blessing. Third-party publishers have to order their cartridges from Nintendo and pay a royalty on every copy sold. That grip on cartridge production is the beating heart of Nintendo’s business model.
The contract signed with Sony hands the licensing rights on disc-based games, and the revenue that comes with them, over to Sony. Nintendo has just shot itself in the foot. It will take Yamauchi a little over a year to realize it. Once he does, he quietly dispatches Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa and his right-hand man Howard Lincoln to Philips headquarters in the Netherlands. Their mission: negotiate a contract that puts game royalties back in Nintendo’s pocket, and get rid of Sony.
III · 1991The slap
The Summer CES opens on Saturday, June 1, 1991, at Chicago’s McCormick Place. It’s the show where the American industry gets its first look at the fall lineup, and Nintendo is there to introduce the Super Famicom to American audiences, two months ahead of its release as the Super NES. Right at the opening, Sony presents the Play Station (two words). The reception is warm. To reporters, it all makes perfect sense: the electronics giant teams up with the video game giant, and the CD replaces the cartridge.
The press isn’t buying the official story. By Monday, the betrayal makes the front page of the New York Times business section. On Tuesday the 4th, the Los Angeles Times reads the affair the same way: a battle over licensing control, and a massive negotiating blunder on Nintendo’s part.
Nintendo-Philips Deal Is a Slap at Sony
The story goes that Sony’s executives learned Philips’s name sitting in the audience, at the same moment as the reporters. The truth is less cinematic: according to David Sheff (Game Over), Sony had gotten wind of the press conference two days earlier, and Howard Lincoln told him the company had tried everything, on several continents, to get it canceled. The press had its suspicions too. As early as Friday, May 31, the Seattle Times quoted a Nintendo spokesperson in Tokyo, interviewed the day before, announcing a deal with Philips to bring the company’s games to the CD-i.
Sony unveiled its console on Saturday knowing exactly what Nintendo would say on Sunday, because it was too late to do anything else. But back in Tokyo, Sony CEO Norio Ohga is furious. That resentment is what will push him to embrace Kutaragi’s idea: build a 32-bit CD-ROM console with no Nintendo and no cartridges, sold under the very name Nintendo walked away from. By breaking the alliance with Sony, Nintendo created its own biggest rival. What happened next, the rise, is told in our deep dive into the history of the PS1.
Contrary to what the Chicago scene suggests, nothing actually ends on June 2. The two companies keep negotiating for more than a year. In May 1992, Sony is still telling the Los Angeles Times it’s preparing a Play Station compatible with Nintendo games for the following year. On October 13, 1992, the two companies even ink a new technology agreement, this time for the next generation of consoles. A compromise reached earlier that year already gave Sony the right to build its hybrid machine, provided Nintendo kept control, and the lion’s share of the revenue, on the games.
Nothing will come of any of it. The Nintendo partnership fades out with no official end date. In 1993, Nintendo drops Philips too: by the most common reading, the Sega CD’s underwhelming run had finished talking it out of the whole idea. Soon, nothing public remains of the alliance: not a single product, and Nintendo prototype consoles whose trail has gone cold. Legend has it two hundred were built, then destroyed on orders from both companies.
The prototype resurfaces
Spring House, Pennsylvania, 2009. Advanta, a credit card issuer for small businesses, doesn’t survive the financial crisis and files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The contents of its offices go up for auction. Terry Diebold, the company’s facilities maintenance man, pays $75 for a lot of office supplies nobody else wants. In the box: a gray console with a tray on the front and a logo he doesn’t recognize. He sticks it in his attic.
Why the Super Nintendo PlayStation prototype was sleeping at Advanta
“It came from Olaf Olafsson’s office.”
Olafsson founded Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc., Sony’s American subsidiary for video games and electronic publishing, in 1991 and ran it until 1996, before serving as Advanta’s president from 1998 to 1999; SEC filings confirm it. According to Terry Diebold, when Advanta closed its New York office, everything in it was shipped to the company’s warehouse in Pennsylvania; the prototype reportedly sat there for years, until the 2009 liquidation.
In July 2015, Dan Diebold, the son, posts photos to Reddit under the username Dnldbld. The cartridge slot on top, the CD tray, the Super Nintendo controller stamped with Sony PlayStation markings: everything matches the handful of Super Nintendo PlayStation prototype images that have been floating around since the 1990s.
Half the internet cries fake. A video, then a close look at the motherboard, eventually settle it: the thing is real — and it turns on.
In 2016, the Diebolds hand the machine to Ben Heckendorn, engineer and host of The Ben Heck Show, whom they’d met at the Midwest Gaming Classic. He opens it up in July: the Super Nintendo side works (you can play cartridge games on it), but the CD drive is dead silent. It will take him nearly a year to bring it back to life.
In May 2017, the tray finally whirs back to life: it reads audio CDs and runs Magic Floor, a small puzzle game written by a hobbyist for an emulator of the console. No official game has ever been found: to this day, the SNES PlayStation prototype only runs software created after its rediscovery.
In December 2019, Terry Diebold consigns the Super Nintendo PlayStation prototype to Heritage Auctions. The house lists it with no reserve, in a video games and comics sale closing March 6, 2020, in Dallas. The auction house’s press release sums up what was known at the time: the sole survivor of roughly two hundred units, once owned by Olaf Olafsson, found by pure chance.
That day, it becomes the most expensive video game item ever sold at auction, far ahead of the sealed cartridges that had been setting records until then. The buyer, anonymous at first, steps forward to CNN a few days later: Greg McLemore, founder of Pets.com and Toys.com, a collector who says he hopes to open a museum one day.
What’s left of the Nintendo Sony PlayStation prototype
On August 23, 2024, Heritage sells a prototype controller dated 1992, on its own, for $35,000. It’s the first time an accessory from the Nintendo PlayStation console has been auctioned solo, and the auction house warns that it has no idea whether it will ever have another piece of the prototype to offer.
It was right about its own sales, less so about history. Over the next two years, two new relics of the Nintendo Sony prototype come out of the shadows, and neither passes through an auction room.
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Piece No. 1 SFX-100 console, faded pink logo The Diebold unit. Found in 2009, revealed in July 2015, sold for $360,000 on March 6, 2020. Greg McLemore’s collection, United States, slated for public display. Confirmed
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Piece No. 2 Blue-logo console The Kutaragi unit. Revealed on March 1, 2025, through Julian Domanski’s photos, with no confirmation from Sony. At Ken Kutaragi’s home, Japan. Documented in photos
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Piece No. 3 Sony MSF-1 development kit Predates the final-form prototypes. Acquisition announced on March 4, 2026. National Videogame Museum, Frisco, Texas. Confirmed
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Piece No. 4 Prototype controller (1992) Sold on its own for $35,000 on August 23, 2024, at Heritage Auctions. Unidentified private buyer. Confirmed
Epilogue
It started out in a $75 box of office junk. The Nintendo PlayStation went on to become the most expensive video game item ever sold at auction, before joining a collection destined for public display. It was thought to be one of a kind; two more units have since surfaced. The legend of the two hundred destroyed Nintendo prototype consoles is cracking, and a story everyone thought was closed is wide open again: how many were really built? And how many are still out there, forgotten in an attic or a warehouse?
Your questions about the Nintendo PlayStation console
How many Nintendo PlayStation prototypes still exist, and where are they?
Two consoles are known as of 2026. The first, auctioned in 2020, sits in Greg McLemore’s collection in the United States. The second was photographed at Ken Kutaragi’s home in Japan in March 2025. Add to those the MSF-1 development kit, which entered the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas, in March 2026, and a prototype controller sold on its own in 2024. The oft-cited figure of 200 prototypes has never been confirmed by Sony or Nintendo.
How much did the Nintendo PlayStation sell for?
$360,000 including fees, at Heritage Auctions in Dallas on March 6, 2020: a $300,000 hammer price plus a 20% buyer’s premium. The buyer was Greg McLemore, founder of Pets.com. A prototype controller sold separately for $35,000 on August 23, 2024.
Why did Nintendo break with Sony?
Because of the contract finalized in 1990, which gave Sony licensing control over every game published on disc. Nintendo, whose business model runs on the royalties that control generates, chose to negotiate a more favorable deal with Philips, and to announce it publicly on June 2, 1991, the day after Sony’s unveiling.
Can you actually play the SNES PlayStation prototype?
Yes, just nothing official. The console sold in 2020 plays Super Nintendo cartridges and, since Ben Heckendorn’s restoration in May 2017, audio CDs and homebrew games written for an emulator, such as Magic Floor. No commercial game for the Super Disc format has ever been found.
Nintendo Play Station, PlayStation, SNES-CD, Super Disc: what’s the difference?
“Super NES CD-ROM” or “SNES-CD” refers to the CD add-on project for the Super Nintendo, entrusted first to Sony, then to Philips. “Play Station,” two words, is how the press of 1991 and 1992 wrote the project’s name; on the recovered console — model number SFX-100 — and on its controller, it reads “PlayStation,” one word. “Super Disc” is the disc format, and “MSF-1” the original development kit. “Nintendo PlayStation” is the nickname coined by collectors and the press: the Nintendo name appears nowhere on the machine.
What’s the link between the PlayStation Nintendo prototype and the PS1?
The PS1 was born from the Sony–Nintendo breakup. In mid-1992, with negotiations going nowhere, Norio Ohga authorized Ken Kutaragi to design a standalone 32-bit CD-ROM console, released in Japan on December 3, 1994. All it shares with the prototype is the name, and the bet on the disc.
