Dan Diebold of Denver Colorado has just unearthed one of the video game industry's most mythical pieces of hardware while rummaging through his attic. The device in question is a prototype of the 'Nintendo Playstation', rumoured to be one of only 200 ever put into production.
First some back story. In the early ninties, Nintendo was the top dog of the gaming industry after the great success of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and its successor the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). At the time, Nintendo was exploring the then revolutionary technology of compact discs (CD).
CD's could hold significantly more data than the current cartridge format Nintendo was using to store it's games so naturally they wanted to bring it to their game consoles. They approached fellow Japanese electronics giant Sony about developing a CD player add on from the Super Nintendo. The partnership between the two didn't last very long and they went their separate ways.
In 1994, using the technology they developed for Nintendo, Sony went ahead and released their own CD based system under the Playstation name while Big N soldiered along with Cartridges and the n64 in 1996. The rest, as they say, is history.
What Dan Diebold found in his attic then, is a piece of gaming history and one of the few remaining relics of Nintendo and Sony's ill-fated union. Polygon has the story of how the item came into his possession.
To summarize: From 2000-2009, Dan Diebold's father Terry worked as a maintenance man for Adavanta Corporation, who as luck would have it, counted former Sony Interactive Entertainment boss Olaf Olafsson as its current CEO. When Adavanta filed for Bankruptcy in 2009, Diebold Sr. was asked to throw out a box of old junk out of the office. Inside that box was the Nintendo Playstation prototype and it has been sitting in the Diebold's attic ever since.
Sometimes one man's trash truly is another man's treasure.
