Super NES CD-ROM System · Super Nintendo / Sony CD-ROM · Build: c. 1992 · Discovered: 2015 · Auction Lot
A small run was built before Nintendo abandoned Sony at CES in 1991. One surfaced in a box won at a bankruptcy auction for $75, and sold in 2020 for $360,000.
The Super NES CD-ROM System was announced as a Nintendo–Sony partnership at CES in 1991, and Nintendo announced a competing arrangement with Philips the following day, in front of the same press. It remains one of the more brutal public reversals in the industry's history, and its consequence was the PlayStation: Sony took the work it had already done and built a console of its own around it. What almost nobody expected to see was the machine itself. A small run of prototypes had been produced — commonly reported at around two hundred units — combining a Super Famicom cartridge slot with a CD-ROM drive for a "Super Disc" format that no commercial software was ever made for. They were assumed lost. In 2015 one appeared, and the route it took is the strange part. Olaf Olafsson, who had led Sony's games division, later became an executive at the financial services company Advanta; a unit reportedly travelled with him. When Advanta went bankrupt, its office contents were auctioned, and Terry Diebold — a former employee — won a box of miscellaneous items for $75. The console was in it. Diebold spent years establishing what he had and getting it working, sending it in 2017 to Ben Heckendorn, who repaired the unit and made the CD drive functional. It went to auction through Heritage Auctions and sold on 6 March 2020 for $360,000 to Greg McLemore, founder of Pets.com — at the time a record for publicly sold video game memorabilia. Diebold had reportedly turned down a private offer of $1.2 million beforehand.
The usual telling of this story treats the CES announcement as an act of corporate cruelty, and it was, but the substance underneath it was a fight about who owned CD-based software on Nintendo hardware. The terms Sony had negotiated would have given it a controlling position in a format Nintendo intended to depend on. Nintendo's response was to go to Philips instead and say so in public, which resolved the immediate problem and created a far larger one.
Sony was left holding a nearly complete piece of hardware, an assembled team, and a specific and recent grievance. Three years later the PlayStation arrived and took the market Nintendo had assumed was permanently its own. It is difficult to name another business decision in the industry whose consequences were both so predictable and so completely unanticipated by the people making it.
Prototypes are not built to last. They are internal tools, and when a project dies the standard fate is a skip or a locked cupboard that is eventually cleared by someone with no idea what is in it. That this unit exists at all is down to a chain of accidents: an executive who took it with him, a bankruptcy that auctioned office contents rather than binning them, and a buyer who paid $75 for a box without knowing what was inside.
The $360,000 price is the part that gets reported, but the more interesting figure is the $75 — the point at which the object was worth precisely what an unlabelled box of old office equipment is worth. Almost everything that has been lost from this era was lost at exactly that moment, to someone who made the reasonable call rather than the lucky one.