Nintendo Play Station auction starts with $30,000 starting bid

At Heritage Auctions, the auction of the unique test console known as the Nintendo Play Station has started. The bidding war started with an amount of $30,000, but the price is rising rapidly.

At the time of writing, $48,000 has been bid on the 1992 ‘Nintendo Play Station Super NES CD-ROM Prototype’. The auction is still running for 22 days. The auction house announced at the end of last year that the presumably the only remaining copy of the console would go under the hammer. It is a device that Sony and Nintendo developed together and that can read both CD-ROMs and Super Nintendo cartridges.

Its owner is Terry Diebold, who got his hands on the device through an auction when the company he worked for went bankrupt in 2009. That company’s CEO, Advanta Corporation, was Olaf Olafsson and he was the CEO of Sony Computer in the past. Entertainment, when Sony and Nintendo made the prototype. Diebold told Kotaku that he once declined a $1.2 million offer for the console.

The amounts for game memorablia can be quite high. Heritage Auctions reported last December that a rare, still sealed copy of Mega Man for the NES had fetched a record $75,000.