The National Videogame Museum Obtains One-of-a-kind Nintendo PlayStation

The National Videogame Museum (NVM) has announced the acquisition of a wildly rare and strange artifact of video game history: a Nintendo PlayStation.

And not just any Nintendo PlayStation. The oldest one, the “original development system” that was once used to prototype the strange collaboration system that ultimately never made it to release.

BREAKING: The NVM has acquired the mythical Nintendo Playstation! 🤯

This Sony MSF-1 is the OLDEST known existing Nintendo Playstation hardware artifact, and is the original development system for Sony’s planned Super Nintendo CD attachment. It is the ONLY known unit to exist!… pic.twitter.com/9JQyCsFtxc

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— National Videogame Museum (@nvmusa) March 4, 2026

This comes from a Twitter/X post shared by the NVM yesterday, which included photos of the machine. “The NVM has acquired the mythical Nintendo Playstation!” it reads. “This Sony MSF-1 is the OLDEST known existing Nintendo Playstation hardware artifact, and is the original development system for Sony’s planned Super Nintendo CD attachment. It is the ONLY known unit to exist! One of the biggest ‘What Ifs’ of all time now lives here at the NVM!”

The Nintendo PlayStation was the strange product of an early 1990s partnership, led by Sony’s Ken Kutaragi, between Sony and Nintendo to develop an attachment for the Super Nintendo that would play CD-ROMs. Only a few hundred prototypes were produced, before Nintendo’s ongoing partnership with Phillips for a similar machine around the same time caused tensions, and the two split. Phillips and Nintendo’s partnership for a CD-ROM attachment also fell apart sometime after, but Sony’s work on the prototype helped spark the company’s eventual development of the PlayStation 1.

A handful of the prototypes have popped up in various places over the years, and Kutaragi still has one as well. But this version at the NVM is even more special, as it’s the original development system, and the only one of its kind. As a result, it looks quite distinct from the few other Nintendo PlayStations that we’ve seen – it’s all function and no form, well before designers had gotten around to smoothing out those corners.

With the NVM acquiring this strange, rare relic, that hopefully means more people will have access to this bit of video game history. It will, hopefully, end up on display in the museum itself and well-cared for – an improvement after at least one prototype was found stashed and yellowing in a box of random items.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.