I’ve always had a weird thing for collections of video game hardware. Rare colourways, odd promotional designs, Japanese-only releases with crazy hardware features, I live for it. So I’ve just spent the last 24 hours clicking through this website, whose goal is to catalogue every console variant there is and ever has been, from fancy PS2s to obscure Gamecubes.
The site is run by Donny Fillerup, who got kinda internet famous last week as the owner of the Queen’s golden Wii. The consoles aren’t all his — we got to see where he lived last week, and it wasn’t a warehouse — but he is overseeing the cataloguing of the images (many being sent in by fellow collectors), and boy are there some rare ones here.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/01/the-queens-golden-wii-has-been-found/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/ypii10widennhyb2kncg.jpg” title=”The Queen’s Golden Wii Has Been Found” excerpt=”Ten years ago, a THQ marketing stunt sent a gold-plated Nintendo Wii console to Queen Elizabeth II. She obviously never received the gift personally, which led People Make Games’ Chris Bratt to wonder: then where the hell was it?”]
I clicked on the Gamecube section first, expecting to see all the greatest hits, then ran into consoles I’d never laid eyes on in my life. Like this baseball tie-in:
And moving on, this absolutely gorgeous PS2:
There’s also this one-of-a-kind PS1, minted in honour of 10,000,000 PlayStations sold:
And this incredible Game Boy Advance SP, made as a tie-in for the film Battle Royale:
And it just goes on and on and on, even down to bonkers little promotional consoles made for local competitions.
You can check out the complete catalogue at Console Variations.
Comments
8 responses to “A Catalogue Of Some Of The Rarest Consoles Ever Made”
I always regret not importing of the gorgeous Panzer Dragoon Orta XBoxes. I had an opportunity to, but never took it up.
Also, Pink Hello Kitty Dreamcast for lyfe.
Whilst not strictly ‘unique’, I have an interesting PS1 in my collection of the SCPH-5903, which is region tagged for NTSC-J, yet is 240v, still has RCA out, and plays Video CD’s.
That’s a perfect one to have for Australia. 60hz with composite and no big ass transformer needed. I’ve been looking at grabbing a PS1 so this is a good heads up for a decent model.
Expect to pay $500 or so when it pops up on eBay.
Yeah been having a look. If good enough condition it seems fair. Otherwise I’ll hunt around the next time I’m overseas. I wanna grab a new DC and accessories pick up first. One of these days I want to buy a astro city naomi cab. That’s my holy grail item. Seen them using a rasppi to load the images directly into the board.
Interesting approach. I must admit I’ve been interested Supergunning a Naomi, but wouldn’t mind the support for them to mirror things like the CPS2 and MVS first.
Yeah one way to run all cps1,2,Naomi & MVS would be great. That would tick all my fighting game boxes for life. But from what I’ve seen it isn’t available, yet. Would be a pi for Naomi and then an everdrive or multi jamma for the others I think. But I would happily settle for a Naomi 2 astro for mvsc2, cvsnk1/2 and sf3 itch. Maybe once DC/atomiswave emulation is 100% perfected switch it over to a emu cab.
I had a limited edition see-through original Xbox. No idea how rare it was though. That’s about the extent of rarer-than-the-standard console editions I’ve owned.
While this is cool though I’d actually like to know about actually rare CONSOLES. I don’t mean rare limited edition versions of consoles that had plenty of production, because that’s just a rare version or model of a console. I want to see actually rare consoles.