We turned on the Nintendo PlayStation: It's real and it works

When a mysterious "NintendoPlayStation" prototype with both an SNES cartridge slot and a CD drive made the rounds back in July, many remained skeptical. Not even Sony PlayStation's head of Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, wanted to confirm its authenticity. Or perhaps he just didn't want to bring up the bad blood between his company and Nintendo over this failed collaboration.

Back in 1988, Sony inked a deal with the legendary gaming giant to add its then new CD-ROM technology to the upcoming SNES console. But when it came to money, they couldn't reach an agreement: Sony allegedly wanted to keep all the money from CD licenses and then figure out royalties with Nintendo later. As you'd imagine, Nintendo didn't take to this arrangement too kindly. Eventually, just a day after Sony unveiled this "Play Station" at the Chicago CES in 1991, Nintendo retaliated with a surprise move bypublicly breaking up with Sony in favor of Philips. Well, that partnership didn't work out for Nintendo, either. But this infamous rupture did lead to the birth of Sony's very own PlayStation, which went on to become one of the company's most profitable assets today.

The "Nintendo PlayStation" is now the stuff of gaming legend, with reportedly only about 200 prototypes ever produced. But, as luck would have it, one of those systems fell into the hands of a father and son: Terry and Dan Diebold. We met up with the Diebolds in Hong Kong, where they were in town for a retro gaming expo, to hear how it ended up in their possession. Most importantly, we got to turn the "Nintendo PlayStation" on, play a couple of SNES games on it, and even take it apart to see if we could fix the dormant CD drive.

'Nintendo PlayStation' prototype hands-on

Thank you so much guys for bringing this all the way to Hong Kong. I understand that this is going to show up at the upcoming retro game expo, which is taking place at the HMV in Central, Hong Kong. First of all, I've heard several versions of the story, but I'd like to hear it straight from the horse's mouth. Terry, can you walk us through how you got a hold of this in the first place?

Terry: Sure. The company I worked for, Advanta Corporation, they filed for bankruptcy (November 8th, 2009). When they did that, we purged the buildings. What you do is you take pictures, you itemize, and then they had an online auction. And I had gotten into the auction myself because there were a few things I wanted to buy. So I knew what were in certain lots. And when they called out the certain lot number, I raised my panel and I ended up winning it. You want to hear the ridiculous price? $75.

But you didn't know what was inside? What were you actually after?

Terry: I actually packed the boxes with my boss. We had to go to the conference rooms and packed up the dishes. You know, for the big bosses meetings and stuff, all the good silverware and everything. So I knew what was in every box, there was a lot of new stuff.

I went to pay for [the lot] at the auctioneer and they turned around and said, "Here are your boxes." And I go, "All of them?" They go, "Yes." I thought: Well, that's odd, because I don't remember that many boxes. So I took two car loads to get my stuff home. There were some bigger brown boxes and I was like, hmm, this is interesting. I opened up one of them and it had a bunch of music CDs, about 200 of them.

So I opened up another box and inside was this puppy here [Nintendo PlayStation] with some games. I was shocked. There were also some plaques, some shoes, a tie. I was just shocked to see this there. I'm like, well this is neat. And I tried to find that [Nintendo PlayStation] online to see what it actually was, but there were no pictures or anything like that. So it's been a tough road trying to find anything out about this, and in comes my son.

So how did this device end up at Advanta?

Terry: One of the board members, Olaf Olafsson, was the CEO at Sony Interactive Entertainment, Inc.

So someone must have forgotten to pick it up before the company closed up?

Terry: Well they closed his office up in New York and shipped everything down to our storage room, fortunately. So this came in with his personal stuff. This probably sat in the warehouse for a few years prior to that.

And then you kinda packed this away? You didn't think too much about it, I guess?

Dan: It kinda just sat in the attic for a while with the Atari we have, the NES and stuff. I was graduating at high school and after a while, we kinda forgot about it.

I was on Reddit one day -- I was on the TIL subreddit -- and I saw a post that said, "Today I learned about the Sony and Nintendo collaboration that was supposed to be." And I went into the comment section and threw a comment up there and said, "Hey, my dad's got one of these in his attic." Of course, nobody believed me. I tried calling my dad to get him to send me a couple of time-stamped pictures, you know, with my Reddit username and everything. But he couldn't really get it correct.

Terry: Well, I took the pictures but they weren't that good.

Dan: Yeah, he was using like a flip phone at the time. He just recently got an iPhone. That's his first smartphone.

Dan: So a while later -- I live in Denver. He lives in Philadelphia -- I came back to visit for July 4th, and I called my dad and he was like, "Yeah, I'll grab that thing out of the attic if you want to come and take a couple pictures of it while you're here." So I went over, took the pictures and made a post on Reddit (on July 2nd) and said, "It took forever, but I finally got some pics of my dad's Super Disc." And that was it. I went to a friend's house for a party that night. My phone died. And the next morning, I woke up and I went back to my house, and when I plugged my phone in, it started blowing up. Some people actually asked me to make a quick video just to prove that I actually have it and everything. So I called my dad and said, "Hey, I'm coming over, you're gonna help me film a quick video." So I went over, filmed that quick video -- the one that got over a million views. It took us five minutes. I filmed it, went back to my mum's house.

And people still didn't believe?

Dan: People still don't believe.

Terry: Well, it's gonna be a little better now.

But to be fair, that's partly because you guys didn't dare to turn this thing on.

Dan: We were kinda afraid to. We didn't want to be the guys that got a one-of-a-kind video game system and then fry it. We would be the most hated people on the planet.