The World's Most Expensive PlayStation Was Made By Nintendo

Behold: it's yellowed, aged, and glorious. This PlayStation from the '90's waits at the center of a fevered bidding war. As of this writing, the top bid for the obsolete piece of hardware has reached $350,000. Why is this ancient artifact of Sony's past worth over a quarter of a million dollars? Because it was actually made by Nintendo. 

The "Play Station," as it's called, resulted from a rare collaboration between Sony and Nintendo. It functions as a kind of prototype NES with one additional feature: it can load CDs. This might not seem like much in today's world of 4K streaming and cloud storage, but it was a pretty big deal back then. This was the precursor to the fabled SNES with CD-ROM support project that never saw the light of day. This one-of-a-kind piece of gaming history could be yours, if you've got the money to spare.

Technically, the bidding for the unit hasn't truly begun in earnest. It will be weeks before the official auction, but, in the meantime, eager, deep-pocketed collectors have driven the price up from a paltry $15,000 to $350,000. USGamer reports that previous to the appearance of the Nintendo Play Station, a mint-condition, sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. set the record for video game sales. The auction house parted with the game for the sum of $100,150.

The Nintendo Play Station already has that beat. There are plenty of interested parties willing to shell out some serious cash for this not-so-mint, but well-preserved piece of history. Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR, claims to have thrown out a six-digit bid for the unit. On Twitter, he said he's determined to win "because I have the largest game console collection, and I am on a quest to digitize and preserve the history of physical video games."

In the coming weeks, we'll see who ultimately wins the honor of owning this odd artifact of the fleeting partnership between Nintendo and Sony.