PS-X

Sony's revenge console just turned 30. This month, LEGO started selling the grudge as a $180 collector's set.

In June 1991, at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Sony announced a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo that it had spent two years developing with Nintendo, internally called something close to "Play Station." Sony would also get to sell its own standalone version and take a cut of any CD software sold on it.

The next day, at the same trade show, Nintendo announced it was dropping Sony and building the same add-on with Sony's rival, Philips, instead. No warning.

Sony's president, Norio Ohga, told engineer Ken Kutaragi to build a console alone instead. The project's internal code name was "PS-X" — PlayStation X, kept specifically as a reminder of what had happened. It shipped in Japan in 1994 as the PlayStation.

The only surviving hardware from the version Nintendo walked away from turned up this spring: a Sony development unit called the MSF-1, acquired by the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas, which called it "the OLDEST known existing Nintendo PlayStation hardware artifact" and "the ONLY known unit." It sits in a display case now, the one physical object left from a deal that ended in a single afternoon.

This month Sony handed the console it built out of that grudge to LEGO. The officially licensed set, revealed September 3 at Sony's State of Play, is a 1,911-piece, near-1:1 brick replica of the original grey console and controller, with two hidden game dioramas (Gran Turismo, Ape Escape) folded inside. Sony's own announcement calls it "building on 30 years of play." It ships October 1, $179.99.