Many Sony and Nintendo fans were surprised by the appearance of a prototype that combined the hardware of a Super Nintendo with an ancestor of the PlayStation, and the surprise was even greater when it was proven to work perfectly. However, everything seems to indicate that Sony has more lost systems in its history, including this mysterious console from the mid-1970s, with a design so strange that it did not even have a conventional gamepad.
Imagine that no company likes the idea of having too long a list of failed projects, but when it comes to hardware development, there is the possibility of finding mysterious and ancient prototypes, lost for decades due to lack of documents, the death of their original creators, the restructuring or disappearance of the company (the 1980s were brutal in that regard), and the rapid rise of new products. The most recent case involved Sony and Nintendo with their hybrid based on a Super NES and the precursor of the PlayStation, of which only 200 units were made. But if we go even further back in time, to the mid-1970s to be more precise, Sony was close to launching something like this:
"Prototype TV Game Machine". The design is so strange that it does not even have a formal title or a code name. In a way it reminds us of a slide projector, but several readers indicated that its general appearance is similar to that of a Fairchild Channel F. It is not known for sure whether this Sony prototype used cartridges or cards (the first option seems the most likely), but the most striking thing is that there is no gamepad. The controls are distributed between a wheel on the right side (we imagine it is for scrolling) and four buttons on the left, three with the legend "Kotae" (answer) and the remaining one with "Susume" (something like "recommend" or "suggest"). If we add all this data, the feeling is that it is a game of "questions and answers", whose content varied according to the cartridge that was inserted.
This machine remained on display for three years between 2002 and 2005. The people at Famitsu, responsible for the images we just saw, tried at the time to obtain more information through a Sony spokesperson, but the company has no specific details to share, and even stranger is the fact that the Sony logo is not found anywhere on the casing.
