BACK IN THE early 90s, Nintendo and Sony started working on a console that would play both SNES cartridges and CD-ROM, and put together a number of prototypes.
However, Nintendo abandoned the partnership because of licensing agreements, the console never saw the light of day, but it paved the way for Sony to release the original Playstation. The rest was history.
More than 20 years since that partnership fell through, images and a video of one of the prototypes have emerged. Dan Diebold uploaded photos of the prototype on Imgur and uploaded a video of it to show it was real. Diebold hasn’t turned on the console as there was no power cable with it.
It’s believed that more than 200 Playstation prototypes were created and Diebold says he got his hands on the prototype through his father.
“My dad worked for a company. Apparently, one of the guys he used to work with, I think his name was Olaf, used to work at Nintendo, and when my dad’s company went bankrupt, my dad found it in a box of ‘junk’ he was supposed to throw out.”
[The Olaf in this story is most likely referring to Olaf Olafsson, who was the head of Sony's Interactive Entertainment at the time].
The reason why Sony’s partnership with Nintendo fell through was down to licensing agreements. Since the contract between the two companies gave Sony complete control over all titles written on CD format, Nintendo’s then president Hiroshi Yamauchi secretly canceled the partnership.
Instead of announcing the PlayStation at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1991, Nintendo announced a different partnership with Philips.
After considering teaming up with Sega, whose board of directors were against the idea, Sony decided to go it alone and launched the PlayStation in 1994. Nintendo launched the CD-i which was a critical and commercial failure.
When Sony announced the PlayStation at its E3 keynote in 1995, Steve Race took the stage for one of the more memorable speeches in the show’s history. While the console was already available in Japan at the time, it wasn’t released in North America and Europe until September 1995.
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