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Legend of Zelda NES Nintendo Prototype On Sale For $150K
YokimaSun writes "Following on from Last months Mega auction of rare games that went for a staggering 1.2 Million dollars, comes another auction. This time its of the only Legend of Zelda Nes Prototype cartridge in the world, bundled with it is a sealed copy of the retail version of the game, those of you excited by this news will have to dig deep because the price is set at a mouthwatering US $150,000.00."
"Game Special Features Horseback riding is a new and key element in the game play. A great deal of combat takes place on horseback enabling Link to bump his adversaries off their war-horses. Shifting camera system that allows for views behind the back and from above. Camera can be locked during battles. All new characters."
so.. does this proto have that or did they just copypaste that from somewhere?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I hate to be that guy, but is this marketing spam? I mean, it's not like it's some lost version of the game or some unreleased sequel. Its a late prototype of a widely released game that may or may not have the exact same ROM on it as the one that shipped. Rare? Yes. Interesting to anyone other than an high level (read:obsessive) collector? I doubt it.
Wow, what a deal!
"... Sean Hannity, whose surgery to remove those bolts from his neck was apparently successful,
Steak with blue cheese is mouthwatering. $150,000.000 for an old NES game is jaw-dropping, staggering, and possibly outrageous. Consult with your local thesaurus to learn more.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
The Zelda Test cartridge comes in that sort of orangeish yellow color. I used to have one myself.
Just do a google search for "NES Zelda test cart", and you'll find plenty of other examples. This particular test cart just happens to have a hand written label.
It's a nice find, but worth no more than $150
I have some early versions of a dice rolling game I made in the late 80's. Never been seen before.
The game crashes in certain circumstances, but it isn't documented exactly why.
The bidding starts at $1000.
Fine, except that he's hiding deep inside a dungeon in Death Mountain, and to get access to it, you'll need to collect the pieces of a sacred relic of power from different dungeons scattered across the land...
"... Sean Hannity, whose surgery to remove those bolts from his neck was apparently successful,
Someone could of easily just taken a old cartridge rom from a released cart. and put it in its own case.
The circuit board is definitely not the same as the released version. The production version of Legend of Zelda has a standard NES-SNROM PCB. The prototype in this auction uses a custom board labeled "NES-SRP-TEST-02" which appears to have four EPROMs installed, probably 256Kbit each. (The production version has the game code on a single 1Mbit mask ROM.)
Several posters pointed out that the description seems to be for a newer Zelda game, not the original Legend of Zelda. This isn't because the seller put in incorrect info, but because there's a problem with the stock eBay description. Whenever you sell a video game on eBay, the selling tool will beg you to select the game from eBay's internal database and hassle you if you don't. This database information contains stuff like name, release date, and a short description (the part which was botched here). It also sometimes contains stock photos, which can be (and usually are) deleted and overridden by whoever is posting the listing.
eBay does the same thing with books and other media as well. You can see this by going to "Sell an item" and entering the media name in the box labeled "Enter a UPC, ISBN, VIN VIN help or keywords that describe your item." There are about 500 entries containing the phrase "Legend of Zelda", so it's not surprising that there might be some corrupted entries and/or duplicates in there.
The factory sealed copy is the one in shrink wrap. The prototype is shown in the video.
I am sure I'm overlooking something, but to me, it seems that all you need to do to "create" this prototype, is burn the ROM file (available around the web) onto the EPROMs, place them into a garden variety copy of Legend of Zelda, and that's it. One could even easily make a funky-colored case for the cart, with a 3D printer. A $50-100 expense for a 3 orders of magnitude higher profit.
Anyone planning to do this would need to design and fabricate a fake PCB as well, since the PCB for prototypes is considerably different for those on production NES games. On most NES boards, you can't even swap in an EPROM without doing some hacking to the traces, since the mask ROM pinouts are not standard.
If someone were both knowledgeable and dishonest enough to try something like this, they'd probably be better off counterfeiting a rare production NES game, like Stadium Events (which routinely goes for thousands of dollars). For that, they could get the PCB and cart casing from a common game, remove the old label, and forge a new one. The hardest part would be getting new mask ROMs with silkscreening matching the originals. My prediction is that if high-end NES collecting proves to be more than a passing fad, we'll see some very convincing counterfeits being manufactured in China before too much longer...
Sorry, your fucking retarded editor is in another castle!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
>I've never heard of "NES-SRP-TEST-02" and apparently neither has Google
I'd bet it has heard of it now ...