The most expensive pad ever

We don’t usually get too excited about ‘prototype’ items but this caught our attention here at NintendoLife Towers. Some lucky chap is currently selling a SNES CD joypad prototype on eBay.

For those of you that don’t know, the SNES CD never actually existed; it was supposed to be a wonderful collaboration between Nintendo and Sony but the failure of the Sega Mega CD put the Big N off the idea and the union was quickly dissolved, leaving Sony feeling more than a little jilted. The result? The company went it alone and the development work carried out on the SNES CD unit evolved into another machine you might have heard of: the Playstation. The rest, as they say, is history.

The pad itself is next to useless as no SNES CD unit was ever produced, but as a collector’s item it represents astonishing historical value; here is a joypad for one of the most talked about pieces of hardware of the ‘90s, a piece of console history that never actually went into production. In terms of design it looks like a cross between the SNES pad and the Playstation pad, which isn’t really a massive shock.

The asking price is a little steep but we don’t doubt that the pay will find a new owner at some point. In the meantime we’re left wondering what might have been had Nintendo not left Sony standing at the altar all those years ago.

[source engadget.com, via cgi.ebay.com]