The Holy Grails of Console Collecting

Retrogaming with Racketboy has up a feature looking at some of the 'holy grails' of console collecting. These are titles worthy of long, hard searches through auctions and used game stores ... both for their quality and their rarity. From the article: "16. Star Fox: Super Weekend/Donkey Kong Country Competition Cartridge, Estimated Price (Loose): $200. If there was a big one-two punch in Nintendo's fight against Sega's Genesis, Star Fox and Donkey Kong Country would be it. While the main retail games may not be rare at all, there was a special package that is quite desirable. The Star Fox: Super Weekend and Donkey Kong Country Competition cartridges were used by Blockbuster Video in tournaments held within the store, and never received a true commercial release. The winners of the tournaments would receive prizes such as jackets and sometimes even vacations."

Comments

Not Impressed

[AKAImBatman]

I thought these titles were supposed to be worth tracking down? Atlantis II, for example, is not much different from the original. As such, it's just a collectors item rather than a really fun game. Pepsi Invaders is just Space Invaders (not even that different from the original 2600 version), and the NES Compo Cart is simply a timed game to get the most points in Mario, Rad Racer, and Tetris. (Ah, I remember actually competing on this cart. Memories.) Basically, I don't see why you'd spend money on these titles unless you're a more of a collector than a player.

For games that are actually fun, here's my list in no particular order:

1) Shuttle Orbiter (2600) $50 - $80
2) H.E.R.O. (2600) $10-$20
3) Diner (Intellivision) $50-$100
4) Galaxy 5000 (NES) $10-$20
5) Thin Ice (Intellivision) $20-$50
6) Killer Bees (Odyssey 2) $10-$15
7) Dreadnaught Factor (Intellivision) $10-$30
8) Happy Trails (Intellivision) $10-$15

The Intellivision is sort of a leader in this space as some of their best titles were released after Mattel Electronics folded. As a result, these titles are very hard to get ahold of. I've only named one's I've played. I'm sure that Stadium Mud Buggies and Thunder Castle are lots of fun too. (In fact, I've been forcefully told as much by others.)

Re:Vectrex!

[Richard Steiner]

I've had a working GCE Vectrex unit since 1983. It's a wonderful machine, though a bit noisy, and I find that people are fascinated by the vector screen even though it's only white lines on a black background. It was the only game machine I had in college -- couldn't afford a PC back then. :-)

Some of the games are quite fun. Mine Storm is far more than "an asteroids clone", though -- with magnetic mines, magnetic shooting mines, and various interesting shapes above level 13 (when the game starts skipping levels and then presenting you with strange shapes on various levels), it does take a certain amount of skill to play. Cosmic Chasm is fun, RipOff is a blast as a competitive 2-player game, and I really like Scramble. Solar Quest is fun, as is Web Wars.

The Vectrex StarCastle clone is too easy (it gives you four concurrent shots instead of three) compared to the arcade game, and Armor Attack has a bug that can be exploited for an almost infinite score.

All in all, it's a fun console. The fact that folks are still writing games for it fascinates me -- see rec.games.vectrex on USENET for more information. :-) I'm way behind in the newer games -- I have two multicarts (one Mark Woodward variant and one Sean Kelly variant), and I think one cartridge from John Dondzilla, but that's about it. Someday I'll buy more.

The DVE Vectrex emulator for DOS is rather decent, by the way. It runs just fine on my PPro/200, so on any modern DOS-capable box it should work without a hitch.

Ultima Holy Grails

[Enderandrew]

Go through a list of Good named roms, and you'll find there are plenty of unlicensed, pirated carts out there. On the Atari 2600, licensing didn't exist because no one made games for other people's hardware before. There was no such thing as third party initially. But when games like Space Invaders, Pac Man and the like became huge hits, other companies released knock-offs that were really the exact same game. Atari sued and lost, and thusly we have third party development today.

There is a game I've seen screenshots of, Origin confirmed, but I can't find any info on. It is rarer than rare. Origin was making SNES and NES ports of many of their PC RPGs. Some are decent and some are horrible (Ultima VII on the SNES for instance). They were dumbed down versions more often than not.

However, the original Words of Ultima: Savage Empire was built using the Ultima VI engine. Origin worked on redoing the game using the Ultima VII engine with all new graphics. The only screenshots and info I've found was for a Japanese Super Famicom version, but it was never officially released.

That would be a rare cart.

Within the Ultima series you've also got the Lost Vale addon for Ultima VIII that was finished, but never released. Even the staff who made the game say they have no idea what happened to the files, but they might be floating around. For years collectors have looked for anything related to it, and just last year the single existing copy of the box prototype popped up on EBay, was confirmed as legit by Origin staffers, and sold for thousands of dollars.

When an empty box sells for thousands, the software itself would be holy grail worthy.

There is also the original 2D isometric Ultima IX that got scrapped, but that was also unreleased.

For a rare released title, there was an FM Towns version of Ultima VI with full speech. Try finding that.

Re:Ultima Holy Grails

[cgenman]

As a game developer, there is actually a staggering amount of stuff which is unreleased. It's estimated that 3 out of 4 games that are seriously developed never get released. Most of these at least make it to the demo stage, while others get canceled very, very late in the project.

A lot of this stuff simply is so rare that it's undiscovered. Or the game isn't a big name, so nobody cares. For an example of rare stuff on a shipping game, the E3 version of Eyetoy: Antigrav used colored gloves to track hand motions. By the time the game shipped, we had switched over to gloveless hand tracking. So we gave the stock of E3 gloves away as keepsakes to testers, making them ultra-rare. But while the game was well recieved, it didn't exactly set the world on fire. Thus it doesn't have that many hardcore fans, and the value of those gloves must be whatever some raver would pay to have a nifty glowing spandex accessory.

There was this little unreleased Guitar Hero gem. When we get liquidated in 20 years, someone might just find those disks for the rarest version of Guitar Hero ever. Of course, it would come on a burnt DVD, which seems to have zero collectible value to most people.

There are a lot of super rare, secret games people worked on which didn't ship. Unfortunately I can't divulge any titles, but I can say that the estimation of 3/4ths projects getting canned sounds about right. Some I've heard of include esoteric banana-bouncing simulations to unreleased kart games with major licensed characters to full on RPG set in modern times, etc. Some of these have real properties behind them that people would kill for, if they knew that a 1-level demo for the unfinished game actually existed somewhere. Capcom-developed Street Fighter 2 Hurricane, anyone?

I'm glad people collect this stuff. There is a lot more out there than you can imagine.

I have #16!

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought the starfox tournament game about 10 years ago at a pawn shop... I was pissed because I thought it was the regular version and I could only play it for 5 minutes.. Apparently it's worth $200 now. Any ideas on how to sell it? I'm not sure e-bay is a good idea since i want to get as much as possible for it, and I don't think there's a very big market for it..