At the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Nintendo of America's then-chairman Howard Lincoln took the stage to reveal some unexpected news: the company was partnering with European electronics firm Philips to make a CD-ROM-based games console. While the announcement took everyone in the audience by surprise, Sony engineer Ken Kutaragi was the most shocked of all. Just the night before, he and several Sony executives had been demonstrating a product developed in partnership with Nintendo. It was to be the world's first hybrid console, featuring an SNES cartridge slot and a CD drive, with both formats available to game developers. That product, called "Play Station" (with a space), would never see the light of day.

Industry lore suggests that only 200 of the Play Station consoles were ever produced, and hardly anyone has actually seen one of the fabled consoles in the flesh. However, pictures of the legendary original Play Station surfaced on reddit yesterday (retrieved via Nintendo Life thanks to the current furore over on the site), showing the hybrid console in all its grey and yellowed-plastic glory.

The reddit user claims that the console was discovered in a box of items given to him from a friend of his father who used to work at Nintendo. The pictures show that the Play Station featured an SNES cartridge slot on top (technically a Super Famicom slot, because it's a Japanese model), complete with a small LCD display and buttons that appear to be used for controlling playback of audio CDs. The rear of the Play Station shows a variety of audio and video outputs, while the familiar SNES controller bears Sony branding.















How Nintendo came to snub one of Japan's biggest and most respected electronics companies, and on a very public stage at CES, is the stuff of gaming legend. Kutaragi, without the support of his employer Sony, had earlier begun working in secret on a chip called the SPC700—an audio chip that would make its way into Nintendo's SNES console. The SPC700—which was capable of producing and mixing eight simultaneous voices at any pitch and volume in 16-bit stereo at 32kHz—was ground-breaking at the time. Kutaragi's work directly led to a partnership with Nintendo where Sony would build two devices: an SNES add-on called SNES-CD, and a Sony-branded console called Play Station that would play both SNES-CD games and conventional Nintendo cartridges.

Nintendo, however, got cold feet. The particulars of the contract between the two companies meant that Sony would control the SNES-CD format, which simply wasn't acceptable to Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. Rather than renegotiate with Sony, at the eleventh hour Nintendo decided to fly to the Netherlands and form a partnership with Philips, one that would give Nintendo total control over its games on Philips machines. Nintendo's decision to publicly abandon a fellow Japanese company and partner with a European one was outrageous to the Japanese business community at the time, and it would not be without consequences.

Sony decided to continue to work on its Play Station, regardless of Nintendo. Concerned at the idea of Sony launching SNES-compatible systems, Nintendo resorted to litigation to prevent the Play Station hitting the market, but the litigation failed, and Sony was free to bring the system to market in 1991. (Not that it mattered too much, given that only 200 of the consoles were produced.)

Sony didn't give up, of course: the Play Station was reworked into the PlayStation, which, when it was released in 1994, had 3D capabilities that were miles ahead of the competition. It would go on to sell well over 100 million units.

While Philips and Nintendo never ended up releasing a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES, Philips would go on to release the infamous CD-i, a horrific console launched in 1992 that would sell only a million units. It would also result in some of the worst Nintendo-branded (but not developed) games of all time, thanks to the fact that Philips was still contractually allowed to use Nintendo characters. If you don't believe that they could really be that bad, head to YouTube and check out Hotel Mario, Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda's Adventure.

While both Nintendo and Sony have had their ups and downs over the past few years, these days it's Sony that's ruling the home console market. Over 22.3 million PlayStation 4 consoles have been sold to date, while Nintendo's Wii U remains the slowest-selling console the company has ever produced.