Heritage Auctions

Heritage Auctions





Heritage Auctions

Heritage Auctions

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech

Update, March 6: After a remarkable bidding war over a span of three weeks, the Heritage Auctions listing for the only known Nintendo PlayStation concluded on Friday, March 6, at the unbelievable price of $300,000. The winning bidder technically paid roughly $380,000 for the winning bid, owing to an additional "buyer's premium" fee attached to the auction.

Shortly after the auction went live in February, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey put his hat into the ring by declaring his intent to be the listing's highest bidder. As he wrote on Twitter: "Who are the other nutters who keep bidding against me?" Should Luckey's boasts have proven true, that would have left him as the "high" bidder ahead of Heritage Auctions' live auction event at $280,000. The Nintendo PlayStation listing only received one bid of $300,000 during the live auction process, and nobody lodged a follow-up bid—which, at the time, implied that Luckey's previous high bid was surpassed without him responding with a bid of his own.

That turned out to be true, as confirmed by a Forbes interview with the winning bidder, a '90s website inventor and investor turned game-history titan. Greg McLemore, who previously founded the sites toys.com and pets.com, has operated a private, sought-after games collection for over two decades, alongside the Killer List of Video Games site of gaming history.

Original story: In 2015, the fabled "Nintendo PlayStation" turned out to be a real thing, discovered in an estate sale of all places. After a whirlwind, five-year world tour, this incredibly rare, one-of-a-kind device's handlers have had enough—they are putting it up for sale.

As of press time, the Heritage Auctions listing is up to a bid of $15,600, with 22 days to go. An enclosed photo gallery confirms that this is indeed the same Nintendo PlayStation that I was lucky to go hands-on with in 2016, complete with ugly-yet-expected yellowing of its exterior plastic body (owing to its flame-retardant materials' oxidation over time).

We've written a lot about this Nintendo PlayStation over the years, and for good reason. As the only known version of this hardware in existence, it's the gaming world's rarest console, if not the rarest item altogether. There's also the added romance of it representing the final collaboration between Nintendo and Sony before their plans for a Super Nintendo CD-ROM system fell apart over licensing deals. (Sony previously built the incredible, sample-based sound system built into every SNES console.) I encourage anyone unfamiliar with this Nintendo PlayStation system to review our previous coverage.

Yet this week's new auction listing manages to unearth some information we've never printed in an Ars article: its detailed origin story. Before now, we'd only heard pieces of its backstory. As the listing states:

At one time, this particular unit was owned by the founder, first president, and first chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. Olaf Olafsson. Olaf eventually left Sony to join Advanta Corporation, and became its president in 1998. A little over a year later, Olaf left Advanta to join Time Warner—but he left his Nintendo PlayStation prototype behind at Advanta. Roughly around this time, Advanta filed for bankruptcy and began gathering up everything in their corporate office to sell at auction. As the story goes, the Nintendo PlayStation prototype was grouped together with some miscellaneous items that [were] boxed up with a group lot, the contents of which were veiled. A nice Easter egg for the winning bidder, indeed!

The listing also claims an exact production count of 200 prototype Nintendo PlayStation consoles, along with the allegation that the other 199 have yet to be discovered. (By the end of this auction's bidding war, it might be cheaper to investigate thousands of other estate sales and storage units in hopes of another discovery than to place the winning bid.)

Missing from the description is the exact working state of the Nintendo PlayStation. In good news, it will load standard Super Famicom cartridges with no trouble, and its included "data cartridge" will communicate with the system in an effort to boot compatible CD-ROMs. However, despite efforts to beat the system into true CD-loading shape, even prestigious hackers like Ben Heck couldn't pull it off . Anyone interested in placing a bid shouldn't expect to code and boot prototype software via this console's working CD-ROM drive.

And, yes, allow me to beat the comment section to uttering this classic Indiana Jones quote: it belongs in a museum. In the gaming sector, we know of a few.

This article was updated on April 12 with information about the auction's winning bidder.

Listing image by Heritage Auctions