Legendary: “Nintendo PlayStation” controller sells for over R$190,000

Just before the beginning of the 3D console era with the Nintendo 64 and the Sony PlayStationa Sony and Nintendo were in a partnership that produced a handful of “Nintendo PlayStations” — and a Heritage Auctions auction on August 23 for one of these limited-edition controllers saw a copy of that partnership sell for a whopping $35,000.

Most of the original 200 Nintendo PlayStations are believed to have been destroyed, so this discovery and sale could end up being one of the only, if not the only sale of its kind.

“Nintendo PlayStation” was an elaborate SNES

The complete Nintendo PlayStation console was listed at auction for $350,000 in February. And its final sale in March cost the new owner a whopping $360,000. That’s a pretty hefty price for such an old console hardware, especially a console hardware that doesn’t even have any exclusive games.

A rare video of the console in action can be seen below. In practice, it kind of makes the Nintendo PlayStation look like a fleshed-out SNES in every way except the name. Considering the PlayStation was intended to be something of a “SNES CD,” it makes sense.

Fortunately for the health of the gaming industry as a whole, the partnership between Nintendo and Sony ended up backfiring.

Nintendo didn’t like the partnership with Sony very much

While it’s difficult to judge the intent, the original nature of the deal between Sony and Nintendo would have given Sony a disproportionate degree of power over Nintendo’s characters and properties, which the Big N obviously didn’t like.

This led to Sony being betrayed by Nintendo’s subsequent partnership with Phillips for the ill-fated Phillips CD-i, and the PlayStation went on to become its own brand separate from Nintendo’s influence.

While the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 consoles had compelling hardware in their own right, the PlayStation’s disc media made it by far the best choice for RPGs and large-scale cinematic games at the time. The N64’s fast cartridges were both more limited in storage capacity and more expensive.

Nintendo was slow to adopt disc-based games

The existence of the Nintendo PlayStation, as well as the Japan-exclusive Nintendo 64DD accessory for the Nintendo 64, also shows how early Nintendo understood the disadvantages of games on cartridge media.

While Nintendo didn’t fully transition to disc-based console gaming until the release of the GameCube in 2001 (and abandoned it with the release of the Switch in 2017), the existence of the Nintendo PlayStation dates Nintendo’s adoption of disc-based gaming to as early as 1992.

Knowing the history behind the Nintendo PlayStation project, these stratospheric auction prices start to seem a little more reasonable. But we’re not going to try to convince you that you’re missing out on the best Nintendo PlayStation games ever made, because none were. Instead, you have the modern 3D console gaming industry.