Unreleased Atari 2600 Game Found At Flea Market

VonGuard writes "I was at the flea market in Oakland yesterday when a pile of EPROMs caught my eye. When I got them home I found that they were prototypes for Colecovision games. A few were unpublished or saw limited runs, like Video Hustler (billiards). Others were fully released, like WarGames. But the crown jewel is what look to be a number of chips with various revisions of Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600. This game was never released and has never been seen. It was a port of the version for Colecovision, and this lot of chips also included the Coleco version. So now I have to find someone who can dump EPROMs gently onto a PC so we can play this never-before seen game, which is almost certainly awful."

Comments

Games Better Left Buried...

[kd4zqe]

I have to chuckle. A Cabbage Patch Kids game? There was probably a reason those ROMs never made it to mass production. I remember E.T. for Atari. If THAT game made it to press run, how bad does the CPK game have to be?!?

Now a Garbage Pail Kids game... THAT I'd play. Even now.

Seems like we're jumping the gun here...

[Guido del Confuso]

How do we actually know that's what's on the EPROMs? They could be mislabeled, or the data on the chips could be unreadable. EPROMs do have a tendency to degrade over time, especially if they're not well taken care of.

Besides, even if they do contain some version of the game, and even if it's readable, there's no guarantee that it's actually a playable game. It could be an unplayable version, or even a test or demo of some sort.

Sorry to rain on the parade. If this turns out to be the real McCoy, I'll be as excited as anyone. But I'd put up even money that this ends up being a disappointment. I hope I'm wrong, though.

Re:What happens to today's games?

[earthlandrealms]

The great thing about the age of carts is just what the article touches on...here's a game that never made it to the store shelves but clearly a copy or two was made on actual hardware that somehow made it to this flea market.

But what happens to games today when they're cancelled? I read about games being put on "indefinite hiatus", or just being cancelled with the company essentially throwing their hands up in the air and saying "ain't gonna happen." What becomes of all that code? Since it just sits on the developer's machines, does it just get wiped when they start on a new project?

Maybe someday someone will find a hd in a flea market labeled "Shenmue 3 SVN Repo", but it doesn't seem likely, sadly.

So while we revel in the curios of the past, we ourselves have none to give to future generations.
It's a lot easier to leak some files on the internet today, then it was to leak a cart back then, and a lot harder to stop.

Re:What happens to today's games?

[somersault]

True, though those were rather extreme circumstances. I hate political correctness. Even if I had a family member that died in 9/11, I wouldn't be looking to blame video games and movies (didn't one of the Spiderman movies have to be redone because one of the scenes involved the twin towers?), or accuse them of bad taste by releasing a game that was accurate in the time it was made. Admittedly a game where you can crash planes into towers could upset some people by digging up bad memories, but you can do that in pretty much any flight simulator.. it's not the game publisher's fault. If someone dropped some giant tetris blocks off of the top of a skyscraper (laced with explosives which would automatically go off when a line was completed, of course) and crushed/asploded lots of people, should we stop playing tetris? Or if someone dropped a giant pizza off the top of a tower and flattened a bunch of people, should we stop eating pizza? It's the highly dedicated person that setup these intricate acts of terror that is to blame, not computer games or food..

Re:Cool

[Gr8Apes]

I doubt it. PS3 was an evolutionary step in the entire video console sequence.

The entire attraction of things like the Coleco/Intellivision/Atari 2600 were that they were the first, and each provided uniqueness in how they approached the video console concept.

The thing they may lament is that they don't remember the Wii, the one console that actually broke new ground this round.

Ugh

[DreamingReal]

From TFA:

OK, now I was getting a boner. Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600.

Is it just me or did this creep out anyone else?

Tagging for posts

[WNight]

I think it means we need tagging for posts.

Which overlaps a lot with moderation, being the same thing but without a formal point system... Maybe with some distributed trust system a tag system could replace the moderation system.

We need a way for people to say "I Agree!" without modding the post up with 'Insightful' or something. And vice-versa. Many people moderate down anything they disagree with just because they have to disagree somehow but aren't prepared to write a message. If they could tag something quick they might be satisfied. (Or if not, in comes that distributed system of trust to reduce the value of their always exaggerated claims.)

Re:So why should we care?

[Stray7Xi]

Perhaps because this is from the dawn of video gaming. If this had been unreleased footage of the silent film era people would make a big deal of it too.