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Through the '90s and '00s, Sony toured the US with what it called the PlayStation Experience truck, an 18-wheeler with a trailer that effectively served as a portable E3 show floor, showcasing new and upcoming games to fans around the country. Now, the 2006 trailer has resurfaced on Facebook Marketplace at an asking price of $70,000.
Images of the trailer started circulating on social media like Reddit over the past few days with a few details, but few links to the listing itself. It seems that's because it's very difficult to actually track down that Facebook Marketplace listing, as the seller apparently has no idea this is a piece of video game history - it's listed purely as a "1999 Craftsman double expandable stage," with no mention of PlayStation anywhere in the description. I only managed to find it because it's being sold in my midwestern home state.
This trailer "has been out of service for several years," the seller explains in the listing. "Trailer was pulled out of storage and hauled about 10 miles to a secure lot. Tires are dry rotted and will need to be replaced before traveling any further distance." But hey, if you're able to swing $70k for the trailer, what's another few thousand for new tires?
The PlayStation Experience truck is one of those easily-forgotten pieces of gaming history, having existed in a less robust era of the internet where these things weren't nearly so well documented. The idea was that this truck would tour the country, setting up at sporting events, music festivals, and other big gatherings of people to give curious onlookers a chance to play new and upcoming PlayStation games, sort of like a public E3 booth.
There's a fun little overview of the truck's earliest tours from a 1997 PlayStation Underground demo disc, which you can still watch today thanks to a YouTube video that currently has just 235 views. If you want to see what the 2006 Experience trailer - the one that's now for sale - looked like in service, the only record I've been able to find of it is a Wayback Machine archive of the official PlayStation website. There are a couple of photos in there showing a competition area and various demo kiosks lit up and ready for action.
Judging by the Marketplace photos, it looks like several of the old monitors - including the "61-inch plasma screen" Sony boasted of in the truck's marketing - are still attached in the trailer, though whether or not any of them still work these days is a major question mark. So, you know, bear that in mind if you're planning on restoring this thing to its full glory.
While the PlayStation Experience truck was a pretty narrow piece of Sony's whole marketing pie, the branding did continue into much bigger convention events that were running as recently as 2018. At a minimum, this $70k trailer ad has at least given us gaming history nerds a solid conversation starter.
Prefer to look toward upcoming PS5 games? You know where to click.
