Nintendo PlayStation auction bidding led by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey

The world’s rarest console is already going for a quarter of a million pounds and the top bidder is the inventor of Oculus Rift.

The mythical Nintendo PlayStation – a prototype made when Sony and Nintendo were going to collaborate on a new console back in the mid-90s – is currently up for auction and it already has one famous name trying to buy it.

The auction works essentially like eBay and at the moment the top bid is for $360,000 (£276,000), although the final price is expected to be in the millions.

Usually there’d be no clue as to who is bidding but, writing on Twitter, Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey claims that it’s him.

Asked why he was bidding on the console, Luckey claimed to have ‘the largest game console collection’, which is not something he ever seems to have mentioned before.

‘I am on a quest to digitise and preserve the history of physical videogames. Perfect VR will ensure the original experience lives on forever, but we need to keep these things alive and functional in the meanwhile’, he added.

When asked about whether the console wouldn’t be better off in a museum he replied that, ‘Public availability is just a matter of time, I have been keeping things low key until then. I am preserving the original copies in the most advanced video game storage facility ever constructed.’

Luckey has a net worth of over $700 million (£537m) so he can certainly afford whatever the console ends up costing and whatever kind of storage facility he’s talking about.

Despite founding the company, and benefiting from its acquisition by Facebook, Luckey was fired from Oculus VR in March 2017.

Although many – including Luckey himself, in a $100 million lawsuit – have claimed this was because of his right-wing political beliefs, Facebook has always maintained it was not.

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