The history of Nintendo consoles has many anecdotes.
Throughout these years it has been possible to see how the video game industry has revealed various anecdotes around the development of both the titles of the studios and the consoles themselves, being so, to give a well-known example, we have the fact that Nintendo 64 had the cartridges to prevent piracyin the same way that there have been consoles that have not come out due to various circumstances to make way for others.
However, in this case we are going to talk about a console that never came out or have a successorsince before the boom that the NES was having, there were those who tried to recreate this same success in the portable format before the Game Boy, the console that was the true revolution. And all this has its origin in Rare, the studio that ironically was Nintendo’s biggest partner.
Playboy was the portable console that Rare was developing in 1989
According to what has been known through an investigation by Time Extension, it has been discovered that Playboy was the console in development by Rare, even though a model of this console owned by Pete Cox is found on display at the Retro Computer Musem in England.
As more than one will have been able to observe, the name of the console would have been controversial, since it coincided with that of the famous American erotic magazine. Despite this, it must be said that this console it was a prototype that it does not get to be compared with Game Boy and with what would have been the final model. You can take a look at it below:
I have no idea where you got this from but yes, this is the thing we built in 1989 to show to Nintendo, except that they announced the GameBoy at the exact time we did this. I wrote the demo code. It was based on our RAZZ board arcade hardware. @DamienMcFerran
— Paul Machacek (@Paul_Mach1) August 31, 2022
Having said all this, it should be noted that, as is often the case with consoles in development, its presentation was planned at a technology fair with the idea of, obviously, commercializing it. However, the surprise came when Nintendo announced the Game Boy, this being a more advanced version that led Rare to cancel the project, being so that the Japanese took all the attention of the event at the same time that the fame of this Japanese company made it impossible to compete against them. And time, it must be said, has shown that Nintendo is the queen of laptopsbeing so that we could soon see how a new Nintendo Direct could raise it more.