Not one, but two unreleased NES games have recently surfaced on eBay, and one in particular should be of great interest to fans of the Nintendo Power Glove and/or Donkey Kong Country developers Rare.
Noticed and shared by Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation, the first game is called Napoleon’s battlefieldsand comes as a prototype cartridge for the game along with, incredibly, its original packaging design as it would have been sent to Nintendo to be printed on game boxes.
Look at him! Photoshop be damned, we have to go back to the days of cutting and gluing pieces of paper onto other pieces of paper:
Although this particular version of the game – localized in English and published by Broberbund – has not been published, we at least know what it is, as it was originally released in Japan as Napoleon Nobodyan incredibly ambitious real-time strategy game for the Famicom that, as disappointing as it looked in reality, also had some amazing static visuals (as you can see in this video from RndStranger):
The second game is where the real mystery lies. Labeled as a “CES SAMPLE” (before E3 started, the Consumer Electronics Show was the big annual event for gaming too), this unassuming cartridge, coming from Rare, is a demo of a game developed specifically for the Nintendo Power Glove.
There weren’t many of them, with only two games ever released with specific Power Glove support (one of them, Super glove ball, also developed by Rare). That would be third. No one in the public has ever seen or played this game, with no physical or digital dumps that ever made it out into the wild.
However, we have some hints as to what it is all about; Rare’s James Thomas called earlier today for info on the demo and it was said from former programmer Paul Byford that he remembers it “was a puzzle game where the cursor was a disembodied hand and you made different gestures to complete tasks. Drilling stones or turning keys, etc.
This makes preserving the game so damn important, which is why the Video Game History Foundation is trying to secure the funds needed to obtain the cartridge. As Cifaldi said on Twitter earlier today, while this is exactly what the organization would normally purchase, right now “our resources are stretched and we could use some help.”
If you want to help, you can DM Cifaldi on Twitter, and you can “discuss tax deductibility options if you’re in the US” while you’re at it. He says he already has about $4,000 in pledges from people, but given the rarity of the two games and the frenzy of the market for this kind of thing in these broken times, there’s no guarantee that will be enough.