Only English Final Fantasy 2 NES Cartridge On Sale for $50K

Croakyvoice writes "In what seems to be the 'in thing' at the moment comes another auction to add to last month's Zelda NES auction and that crazy million dollar collection. This time, for RPG fans, this could be classed as the Holy Grail of NES games. The game in question is Final Fantasy 2, which was never released outside of Japan, but luckily for the person who at this time is selling this on eBay for 50K, there was one made for the 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by SquareSoft. Sadly, the U.S. version never had a release because they decided to work on the Super NES instead."

Comments

Is it worth it?

[joeflies]

I never really understood why these development cartridges fetch such high prices. Well, on a superficial level, I understand since it's a matter of supply and demand. But at a deeper level, it's a one off because it's an unfinished product. To me, I don't see any difference between a free fan-based english conversion vs an official "never sold to the public" version.

Would you pay millions of dollars for a test version of Windows 98 developed for esperanto? The answer is no, because nobody cares. However, the same logic doesn't apply when it comes to toys and games

Re:Is it worth it?

[Chemisor]

People also pay a lot of money for an original Van Gogh painting, even though a good modern painter can make you a copy that only an expert would be able to distinguish from the original. If appearance were the only thing that mattered, the price difference wouldn't have been as great.

Re:Does anyone know if...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. The person auctioning the cart dumped it himself. (It's Frank Cifaldi, who's a pretty well-known video game historian and journalist.) While doing so kills the market value, Frank Cifaldi believes more highly in the preservation of prototypes and betas than in maintaining the value by letting a cartridge languish in a box and degrade.

I believe his site, Lost Levels (lostlevels.org) in fact offers the ROM for download for preservation purposes.

The translation is kind of rough, but I suppose we shouldn't be surprised.

Re:He should have sold earlier

[Burning1]

Huh? Lots and lots of us in the US played Final Fantasy 1, Final Fantasy 4, and Final Fantasy 6. A bunch of us also played fan translations of Final Fantasy 5. I also played 7, but I haven't tried anything more recent... I just don't have the time or energy to play Final Fantasy games anymore.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bit of a generational gap between those of us who played FF1-6, and those that play FF7+

My bet is that the guys who played FF1-6 are the same group who miss reading Nintendo Power. :)

Re:Old NES translations

[LocalH]

Those were fan-created translations. This one was official.

Re:It's just the translation patch, it's a fake

[Myria]

10 dollars says it's the US fan-made translation patch that some idiot programmed onto EPROMs and is passing it off as a "rare prototype".

While that's possible, in general, there exist ways to determine whether a game has been translated by force. Because of the lack of the original source code, many of the changes to the existing code will be done as branches to other areas of ROM.

If you change the size of a block of assembly code, you have to adjust pointers throughout that segment and beyond. This is the task of an assembler and linker, working on your source code. For ROM hacking, you don't have the source. It's infeasible--and provably uncomputable in the general case--to know where all these pointers are, so that you can adjust them when you rebuild with hacks in place.

Thus, patched ROMs are made by placing branches in one part of the code pointing at some previously unused area, then jumping back after finishing whatever needed to happen there. These jumps can be detected in a thorough analysis of a given ROM image in comparison to its Japanese original. If it is clear that the code adjustments made for the English version were made by reassembling from source, the probability that it is a translation from the original author is very high.