What are the remaining holy grails of videogame collecting?

I feel like there is very little stuff left, like when I first started collecting the most rare thing I thought I could get was an original JPN Wondermega or a Playdia, but that was just the tip of the iceberg and when I discovered the original museum on this page I was blown away by the sort of stuff there was out there.

But now I feel everything has already been discovered/collected and whatever is left are just small potatoes.

Are there any big mysteries left to uncover?

 

There are tons of gaps in terms of prototypes, but even ignoring those, there are a lot of one-off consoles that were given away with contests that will likely never be accounted for.

 

For example?

 

Well the Konix Mutlisystem dev kit was unveiled not too long ago and a working emulator was released, so that's a big one of my list.
But I'd like to see evidence or something from that 1989 era Namco home system that was rumored in early issues of EGM

 

Le Powerconsole

 

There are many rare things that are hardly in circulation at all and even wealthy and serious collectors do not have them in their possession due to the scarcity.

Examples for this would be Yanoman Puzzle Catalogue, a Saturn promotional disc of which the only known copy in the world is displayed in Super Potato. Offers of multiple thousand $$$ have been turned down by the shop staff, so unless another copy pops up this will remain the holy grail of non-development Saturn software-collecting.

Other impossible-to-get things would be unreleased hardware such as the PowerConsole, the two unique PC-Engine Hibino consoles or simply software that is pretty much impossible to find, even on Japanese auction sites/shops. Kids Station Volumes come to mind (PC-Engine SCD), or rare Famicom cartridges like Space College. Mega Drive carts such as Go-Net or Wondermidi are VERY hard to get, too, and hardly explored by the collector's society.

 

Oh yes, the Taito WoWoW. Now that is a real holly grail. As far as I know, only Darius was ever shown running on it.

 

How rare are we talking here? Stuff that isn't commonly known or stuff that copies of can be counted on one hand? I personally think that Geist Force is a big one. Sure the iso image is available now and there like 1000 pressed copies floating around the world (I have one) but it's still a rare game that was supposed to be released in 1998 with the Japanese Dreamcast launch but was shelved for unknown reasons.

 

You mentioned your ownership of this game around 100 times in the past couple of days. I think a lot of people here have one... it's not gonna be a holy grail ever, it's a selfmade fan project. Special interest gimmick for certain hardcore collectors at best.

 

Nintendo Playstation, FDS retail rewriting kiosk, Dinosaur Planet, Primal Rage 2, to name a few off the top of my head. I'm sure plenty of people could name much rarer and more desirable ones, but these are some of the few I'd love to see most.

 

One thing that comes to mind is the Hi-Ten Bomberman that was available until recently for the public to play somewhere I can't remember in Japan but went to the dumpster since it got broken. I remember reading it on the PCEngineFX forums. At least one holy grail is unattainable.

 

By 'recently', do you not mean 1993?

 

One item I'd really like to see, which as far as I know hasn't been released yet, is Saturn Virtua Fighter 3. Biohazard 1.5 has never really interested me all that much, but Saturn Virtua Fighter 3 is something I would very much like to see released to the public. There are plenty of others here who feel similarly. We know it existed at one point, and that it was near completion. It's likely that it was in the hands of more than just a few people, so it's entirely possible that it'll see the light of day eventually. That's the only item I'm interested in that's currently unknown the the gaming community as a whole.

As far as personal holy grails - things that are expensive/difficult for me to obtain, but that are nonetheless well known to the community - there aren't many left. The RG-M1 Victor Wondermega was one of those at one point, and I now have that. The same is true of the Virtua Fighter 3 arcade board. There are two items left that I'd really like to own: a 64DD with complete game set, and a Panasonic M2 prototype unit. The former will probably happen eventually, as they aren't that rare (relatively speaking), and they've actually gone down in price in recent years. The latter - the M2 proto unit - is a lot less likely. They show up every now and then, but they're very rare and very expensive. It's also not a very high priority for me, since I'm really after it more for its looks than functionality.

I'd also be interested in seeing some unreleased 64DD games, but very little is known about those, so I don't even know what to expect.

 

Not quite true here. It was playable at the NHK studio in Shibuya until 2002, until the game broke down completely and nobody was able to resurrect it again from death (this according some interview of a worker at the studio).

Until this day it remains unkown of what exactly happened to the system after it went fubar, and where it might be (could be also disposed).

 

Thunder Force VI on dreamcast, the ost was completed, there must some playable code out there!!!

 

Yeah that's what I meant

Not a game per se but the Resident Evil 1.5 CGI cutscenes were confirmed to be completed also but not implemented on any build? Who knows if there is surviving footage on a DAT tape in an archive somewhere.

 

What would be interesting would be to see more unreleased/beta Virtual Boy games surface. We've already had Bound High and Faceball recently, which are both near 100%-completion (and Bound High is absolutely fantastic), and the Space Pinball prototype which was a nice surprise as well.

As such I'm still as to the possible surfacing of protos for other titles like Dragon Hopper or Zero Racers (the console's F-Zero).

 

Personally, I would love to see some SNES/SFC CD stuff. Someone has a dev unit that plugs into the cartridge slot, and another person has a "Sony Play Station", but we have not actually seen any software. I imagine any software is behind lock and key at Nintendo or Sony (or perhaps even Square), so I would be surprised if anything got out.

 

Know that's something I would love to see, up there for my "grail"