Someone has purportedly found themselves in a possession of a rare prototype add-on for the SNES.
Arguably one of the biggest mistakes Nintendo ever made was its early-90s betrayal of Sony. You see, while they’re rivals in the gaming-sphere today, back in 1988 the two partnered up to produce a disc-based add-on for the SNES. Sony would go on to unveil said add-on at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show. Unfortunately for them, Nintendo decided to pull some shenanigans and, a day later, announced that it was cancelling their deal and would instead be entering into a new partnership with Sony’s rivals at Phillips. Understandably peeved, Sony decided to take its little add-on and use it as the foundation for the original PlayStation which, of course, would go on to wipe the floor with Nintendo’s N64 a few years later.
So why are we telling you all of this? Because we felt a bit of context might help you understand the full awesome-factor of a discovery one Reddit user has shared with the internet. More specifically, they’ve shared photos of what’s supposedly an intact prototype of Sony’s SNES add-on. The prototype in question was apparently discovered in a junk pile by said gamer’s 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.”
While the add-on itself would represent a significant find, the appearance of the name “Olaf” in the explanation could add even more substance to the discovery. If the story’s true, the Olaf in question could conceivably be Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, a.k.a. the co-founder and original CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment. In other words, this may have once belonged to one of the people principally responsible for its creation. Even if it didn’t though, there’s really no understating how valuable this is. Barely 200 of the prototypes were ever produced, meaning that this is literally one of the rarest pieces of gaming hardware ever made.
Source: GamesRadar
Published: Jul 3, 2015 06:00 pm