A piece of Nintendo history with a blood-red power button and 3.5mm jack is up for auction in Japan.
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Over on the Japanese Yahoo Auctions site, someone has listed an apparent pre-production version of the Super Famicom — the Japanese counterpart of the Super Nintendo (SNES). It’s similar to the console Nintendo eventually released in 1990 but with some stand-out differences, like a headphone jack and volume wheel on the side. Video game collector and historian Chris Kohler called it “god-tier Nintendo collector bait.”
Some other variations include a big red power switch and the fact that the controller ports are on the left side of the console, rather than centered as they were in the eventual production model. There’s also what looks like the console’s expansion port on the front, rather than the bottom where it lived on the final design. The panel surrounding the controller ports looks yellowed — it wouldn’t be part of the SNES family without that though, would it?
Here’s a gallery of the images from the auction:
Compare that to the final release:
And the terrible thing we ended up with in the US:
The prototype looks a lot like one pictured in magazine scans from a 1989 Nintendo press demonstration — see below — as well as other prototypes from the era shown in pictures published by Time Extension.
Those design touches went out the window for the SNES released in the US, which ended up with a chunky, boxy design that had purple, sliding switches on top instead of the round, sloping, compact design. Nintendo released a revised SNES, the New-Style Super NES, in 1997 that came a little closer, but with a pill-shaped power switch and circular reset button.
Another lost Nintendo prototype showed up a few years ago in the Nintendo / Sony PlayStation that Pets.com founder Greg McLemore bought at an auction — which also had a headphone jack. Two years before that, an unreleased, wired version of the Wiimote that connects to the GameCube was sold in a Japanese auction for $660. The Super Famicom prototype being auctioned today is, as of this writing, sitting at just over one million yen (just shy of $7,000 USD), with more than five days to go.
