BILLIONUnreleased NES games have recently appeared on eBay, and one of them will be of particular interest to fans of the Nintendo Power Glove and/or Donkey Kong Country Rare developer.
Discovered and shared by Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation, the first game was called Napoleon’s Battlefieldand comes in the form of a prototype cartridge for the game, along with, immensely, its original packaging design as it would be sent to Nintendo to be printed on the game box.
Look at it! Damn Photoshop, we need to go back to the days of cutting and pasting pieces of paper over other pieces of paper:
While this particular version of the game — localized to English and published by Broberbund — hasn’t been released, at least we know what it is. It originally appeared in Japan as Napoleon Senkian extremely ambitious real-time strategy game for the Famicom, as frustrating as it gets to play for real, also has some great stills (as you can see in this video by RndStranger):
The second game is where the real mystery lies. This simple cartridge, marked as “CES SAMPLE(Prior to E3, the Consumer Electronics Show was also the major annual event devoted to gaming), and as coming from Rare, is a demo of a game specially developed for the Nintendo Power Glove.
Not many of them, only two games ever released with specific Power Glove support (one of them, Ball Super Gloves, has also been developed by Rare). This will be a third. No one in the public has ever watched or played this game, no physical or digital landfill has ever made it wild.
However, we have some hints as to what happened. Rare’s James Thomas made a call earlier today for demo info and was told by former programmer Paul Byford which he recalls that “was a puzzle game where the pointer was a monstrous hand and you made different gestures to complete the task. Punch kicks or turn keys, etc.”
That makes preserving the game extremely important, which is why the Video Game History Foundation is working to secure the funds needed to hold the cartridges. As Cifaldi said on Twitter earlier todaywhile this is exactly the kind of thing an organization usually buys, at the moment “our resources are limited and we can use help,“
If you want to help, you can DM Cifaldi on Twitterand you can “discuss tax-deductible options if you are in the United States” while you are there. He said he had about $4,000 pledges from everyone, but given the rarity of both games and the frenzy of the market for this type of content in this shattered time, there’s no guarantee that. there will be enough.
