A Colorado man revealed images this week of what might be the rarest and most treasured piece of video game memorabilia ever: a prototype of the never-released Nintendo-Sony Play Station console.

Dan Diebold of Denver posted a photo of what he called his father's "super disc" on Reddit Thursday. The photo showed an old grey box that did, indeed, resemble promotional pictures of the original PlayStation.

Additional pictures showed details of the box, made of a mix of components gamers might recognize as coming from the Super Nintendo and what later became the Sony Playstation. Included is a Super Famicom controller (it was called the Super Famicom in Japan) but with a Sony PlayStation logo.

Diebold also has a demo cartridge with the date "92 10 6" on it, but since he doesn't have the power cable he has no idea what's on it.

A closer look at the front of the machine. The lower part's plastic has yellowed like many older Super Nintendo consoles do after long exposure to the air. (Dan Diebold)

Polygon reports that Diebold's father, Terry Diebold, worked at a maintenance company that was run by Olaf Olafsson, who also happened to be the CEO of Sony's then-nascent interactive entertainment division. Terry kept everything he got his hands on from his old jobs, including the Nintendo Play Station prototype.

When Dan visited his family in Philadelphia, he unearthed the old machine to shock gamers online. "I found it a couple of years ago," Diebold told Polygon. "My dad had it in his attic."

Sony-Nintendo fallout led to modern PlayStation

The joint project between Nintendo and Sony began in the late 1980s, when compact discs were becoming popular media for music storage. The collaboration would have resulted in a separate attachment that would allow the popular Super Nintendo to play CD-based games. But Sony also designed their own machine, tentatively called the Play Station.

The deal allegedly fell apart in 1991, when Nintendo revealed it went with Sony's rival Philips to make the SNES-CD instead. Allegedly "out of spite," according to video game historians Did You Know Gaming, Sony went ahead with its nascent project to make the PlayStation on its own.

Sony launched its Nintendo-free PlayStation in 1994, and remains one of the dominant names in gaming. Meanwhile, Nintendo's deal with Philips also fell through, and Philips went on to make its own system, the CD-i, which is widely considered one of the biggest failures in the gaming industry.

The attached controller is a standard Super Nintendo game pad with a Sony Playstation logo, and Nintendo's Super Famicom logo. (Dan Diebold)

Only about 200 prototypes of the Play Station were built, and once the deal fell apart they were ordered destroyed. Diebold's machine might be the first and clearest look at what it might have looked like.

Some have raised doubts as to the machine's veracity, however. Comments on message boards note that the font appears to show PlayStation as a single word, while the original project was named Play Station. Some parts of the console have yellowed due to age, while others have not. And it doesn't look quite as refined as a 1991 promotional image of the same machine.

What do you think? Is this a long-lost piece of video game history, or an elaborate hoax?