A link to this popped up in a You Tuber's facebook time line, somebody asking him what this is. Seemed like an interesting little oddity that my good friends (frenemies?) at Assembler could solve. http://www.shopgoodwill.com/viewitem.asp?itemid=27600021 Some sort of NES Test cart. At a Goodwill of all things
Yikes, 30k is a lot for what at best is a basic hardware test cart like Nintendo used to service consoles. Without seeing the innards, the thing could be a relabeled Super Mario Bros. for all we know.
Yep, there must have been hundreds of these things back in the day. Also, a "Parts only" auction at that, not even tested.
Goodwill is very savvy on game items. It's not like the early days when you could buy a nes with 100 games for $40 on the web site they had. They are very efficient at getting maximum profit.
I think there was a CluClu Land cartridge in this style sold some time back. I believe it was marketed as a prototype and the label said it was an aging cassette. I can't fathom someone willing to pay more than maybe a few hundred for this. Absolutely no way in hell is the $30k a legit bid.
You forget that this is 100% tax deductible. If you make $300-500K a year, this is a great tax deduction.
Yeah atleast at the goodwill that I work at there are pamphlets all over that have various thins that are worth money and the video game section if fairly large, we also scan all the media that comes in so expensive games don't get put out on a shelf, if it's loose carts the online sales team will look up prices on eBay for them before they send it off to the warehouse to be put online.
According to the label, it's "Soccer" - which would make sense, since that was one of the NES launch games. The label doesn't really say much - the top line is "Inspection use cassette" (or Test cassette), the big text in the center is "For inspection use" and the marking in the lower right is "not for sale". My guess is that it's just a retail cart with a different label.
I think it is a little high, but in general proto/demo/sample NES stuff seems to go for much more than other consoles. I don't think it's really a prototype, most likely just the retail game quickly put together for demonstration purposes.
The collector definition of "prototype" is kind of nebulous, but this is a pre-release version of an NES launch game. It is an NES game that was (I assume) made before the NES existed. No matter what's inside, that's a big deal. I believe it's the only example that's ever been found of an NES item that dates before the NES' retail debut, outside of brochures and launch party swag. Let's also remember that a cartridge that was confirmed as literally being a retail version of EarthBound with a hand-typed label on it sold in the 4-figure range. Internal first-party Nintendo stuff that shouldn't be for sale is valuable, no matter what data is inside of it. That said: If you opened this up, you'd likely find a retail board for the Famicom version of Soccer with a pin connector on it. Here's why: 1. The first public demonstration of the final design of the NES was at SCES in June, 1985. This is the earliest possible time that this cart shell design could have been demonstrated (outside of private meetings), as it was still the AVS (with Famicom-style shells) at its prior showing in January. 2. Soccer was released in April, 1985, meaning retail boards were available. 3. Soccer is one of the early NES releases that is known to occasionally be found with a Famicom board inside of it. I think the safe assumption is that the earliest copies were like this.
Hmm, I wonder what happened, no one had a credit card that could go $30k? lol, I was definitely at 30k when we first checked it out.
