Earlier this week, someone put up what was believed to be a prototype of Nintendo’s Super Famicom console for auction. Such a rare piece of gaming history could very well have sold for a high price but, ahead of the auction’s May 12 end date, the prototype has now been pulled, and no one knows why.
As spotted by Kotaku, the prototype is no longer listed on Yahoo Japan. Right before it was removed, though, Kotaku was able to grab a screenshot of the listing, which shows that the auction ended with zero bids. This is rather strange since bids for the prototype were skyrocketing. When I last checked, it was going for a few thousand dollars, but Kotaku reports the bids shot up to several hundreds of thousands of dollars, before soon crossing the $3 million mark.
Given it ended at zero bids, it doesn’t seem like the item was sold to anyone. So, what happened? While there’s no definitive answer, VGC’s Andy Robinson has suggested it’s because of scam bids, meaning people were placing bids (or using bots to do so) with no intention of actually spending the money and artificially raising the price. By comparison, a prototype of a Nintendo Sony hybrid console only went for a ‘mere’ $360,000 (via CNN). That console never saw the light of the day thanks to an infamous falling out between Nintendo and Sony, so it’s somewhat hard to imagine people would be willing to pay more than eight times as much for a prototype of a console that actually did come out.
At the time of writing, there’s also no way of knowing when or if the Super Famicom prototype will be put back up for auction. Although there’s a discussion to be had about whether this item is genuine or not. It certainly looks authentic at a first glance, and does resemble how the Super Famicom looked in 90s magazines before it launched (as noted in this Tweet), but we’d need an expert historian to get their hands on it first and foremost. Whatever the case, it’s worth keeping an eye out should the auction ever pop back up. With any luck, not only will the prototype be the real deal, but someone will be able to buy it and then donate it to a museum or something for the sake of posterity.
