SNES PlayStation
Image: @kantan_japan

Ah, the 'SNES PlayStation'. It's commonly held up as one of the biggest 'What Ifs?' in gaming, but this once mooted (and later, betrayed) collaboration between Sony and Nintendo could have changed the industry landscape forever.

We got a peek at this fabled crossover back in 2016 when the console was found in the wild. The prototype would go on to sell for an eye-watering $360,000 a few years later, but, as it turns out, it wasn't quite as one-of-a-kind as we initially thought. In fact, the former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment and the "Father of PlayStation", Ken Kutaragi, just so happens to have one kicking about in a cupboard (thanks for the heads up, Time Extension).

This is according to the Tokyo-based videographer/photographer Julian Domanski, who recently took to Twitter to share that he had been lucky enough to "fondle a Nintendo PlayStation" after a meeting with the Kutaragi. "The ex CEO of SonyCEA has one in his closet," Domanski explained, and he snapped up the following photos to prove it:

Naturally, Domanski got Kutaragi to sign his PS1 while he was there because why wouldn't you?

Now, we're not normally ones to get all that envious, but come on! Former Sony executive Shawn Layden recently told Eurogamer that Nintendo had left Kutaragi "proverbially standing at the altar with his optical disc drive in his hands" at the 1993 Computer Entertainment Show, but we never assumed he would have held onto the thing!

When Nintendo made a last-minute pivot to Philips for its disk drive add-on, the 'SNES PlayStation' dream was put to bed, but that's not to say there isn't still a story or two to be told. On a recent episode of the Minnmax podcast, PlayStation's Shuhei Yoshida reminisced about playing an "almost finished" space shooter on the console in his early days at the company.

Heck, if we had a root around the boxes in Kutaragi loft, we'd probably find a copy of that very game...

So there we go, there's another SNES PlayStation out there! Let us know what you make of this discovery in the comments.

[source x.com, via timeextension.com]