that was snes playstation?
Nope.
Sony was quietly gathering developers (like Square) under the "SNES CD" banner for some time before they unveiled their "Play Station" at CES in summer 1991.
Then Nintendo (not happy with the partnership being tilted entirely in Sony's favor) declared war on Sony by revealing their competing SNES CD hardware, made by Phillips. Sony told developers "Nothing to see here, keep working on those PlayStation games."
Sony and Nintendo stared each other down for about a year (1992) before Sony surrendered and gave Nintendo total control over the Play Station. Nintendo declared that they were going to merge the Phillips and Sony designs to make one super-console, and Sony knew that was nonsense so they walked away from Nintendo and vowed revenge.
Square was forced to downgrade Secret of Mana (1993) to fit on an SNES cart, because it was clear that Nintendo was never going to make an SNES CD, and Square was vocally unhappy about it.
...
Chrono Trigger was released in 1995. Right after Chrono Trigger, they started work on FF7-SNES, but it was canned when Square decided to jump to next-gen, which was the N64 by default. FF7-N64 never got past experimenting with the analog controller before Square decided to give up on Nintendo and jumped to Sony's ship.
I'm wondering what came up in conversation that made the dad remember that he had that in his attic all this time. Not exactly a day to day causal topic.
According to
the thread on this...
Sony made 200 Nintendo PlayStations. After the breakup, Sony ordered them all destroyed. Olaf Olafsson (a major figure from Sony America) said "Screw that, I'm keeping mine." He eventually moved on to a new company, and his Nintendo PlayStation was apparently seen sitting on his desk as a conversation piece.
This company went bankrupt, and the dad (an employee of Olaf) was told to throw away a pile of computer junk. The dad kept the junk. The kid was looking through the junk one day, and said "What's this? Some sort of PlayStation prototype?"
It has a "2" handwritten on the bottom of it. It might be #002 of 200 (Kutaragi probably kept #001), and it survived two separate execution orders.