An original prototype of Nintendo’s Super Famicom, Japan’s (superior) version of the SNES, is currently up for auction and recent bids have already pushed the grey piece of gaming history north of $3.2 million. The “god-tier” nostalgia bait shows the market for retro collectibles can still be all over the place.
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The prototype, now for sale on Yahoo! Auctions Japan, differed from the final system in few different ways. The most notable is a fire-engine red power button on the front instead of the dark grey one Nintendo eventually went with. The experimental version also had a headphone jack and a volume dial on the side, as well as an expansion port on the front instead of underneath the console.
The Super Famicom prototype is what people would have seen in magazines ahead of the console’s 1990 release. It was a window into the future as existing fans twiddled their thumbs on the NES before making the 16-bit jump to next-gen hits like Super Mario World. “I think this has extreme nostalgic appeal because we all spent so long staring at these prototypes and dreaming of a time we could finally buy this amazing new Nintendo,” Digital Eclipse editorial director Chris Kohler wrote on Twitter.
While the price started in the mere hundreds, it’s now jumped well beyond what anyone seemed to expect. “I’ve had my eye on this since it was around $800 and figured I’d be willing to pay up to like 10 grand for it,” tweeted localization specialist John Ricciardi. “It’s now over $640,000 lol.” Less than 24 hours later, the price has only continued to spike.
Compare that to the mythical Nintendo Play Station prototype from back when the Mario maker was working with Sony on a next-gen console with a disc drive. That piece of hardware never came to be as the two companies famously went their separate ways, and that window into an alternative gaming history went for just $360,000 a few years ago in 2020.
With an end date of May 12, the Super Famicom prototype auction still has a few days left to go. At this point it already seems well on its way to becoming the most expensive gaming collectible ever.