Not one, but two unreleased NES games have popped up on eBay recently, and one of them should be of particular interest to Nintendo Power Glove fans, and/or Donkey Kong country Developer Rare.
seen and shared by Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation, the first game is named Battlefields of Napoleonand comes in the form of a prototype cartridge for the game along with the incredibly original packaging design as it would have been sent to Nintendo for printing on game boxes.
Look at it! Damn Photoshop, we need to go back to the days when scraps of paper were cut and pasted onto other scraps of paper:
While this particular version of the game – localized into English and published by Broberbund – is unreleased, we at least know what it is since it was originally released in Japan as Napoleon Nobodyan incredibly ambitious real-time strategy game for the Famicom that, as frustrating as it looks to actually play, also had some amazing static graphics (as you can see in this video by Rnd stranger):
The real secret lies in the second game. This humble cartridge, labeled “CES SAMPLE” (prior to the launch of E3, the Consumer Electronics Show was also the big annual gaming event) and from Rare, is for a demo of a game made specifically for Nintendo Power Glove.
There weren’t many of those as only two games were ever released with special Power Glove support (one of them, Great glove ball, also developed by Rare). That would have been a third. No one in the public has ever seen or played this game, and no physical or digital dumps have ever made it into the wild.
However, we have some clues as to what it was about; Rare’s James Thomas called earlier today to get info on the demo and he did said Former programmer Paul Byford recalls that it was “a puzzle game where the cursor was a disembodied hand and you made different gestures to complete tasks. Hit rocks or turn keys etc.”
This makes preserving the game damn important, which is why the Video Game History Foundation is trying to secure the funds needed to get the cartridge. As Cifaldi said on Twitter today, while this is exactly the kind of thing the organization would normally buy, at the moment “our resources are tight and we could use some help”.
If you want to help You can DM Cifaldi on Twitter, and you can “discuss tax-deductible options when you’re in the US” while you’re at it. He says he already has around $4,000 in pledges from people, but given the rarity of both games and the madness of the market for this type of stuff in these troubled times, there’s no guarantee that’ll be enough.
