Are We Looking At Satoru Iwata’s First Nintendo Game?
Arcade preservationist Frank Cifaldi recently acquired a number of prototype NES ROM boards from an eBay seller. One particular board contained what may be one of the best finds of his career: an early version of NES Joust. Cifaldi explains why:
I have just acquired and preserved an incredible piece of video game history. It will take a few tweets to explain:
These are boards for the Famicom. I don’t know if the BOARDS are authentic, but the rewritable EPROMs are def. old.
These were kinda fishy looking but I picked them up anyway. They are: Hyper Olympic, Stargate (Defender II), Soccer, and Joust.
I dumped the ROMs. All but Soccer are definitely earlier-than-retail code. Here are some clear differences in Joust.
Joust has an interesting history. It was programmed by Satoru Iwata in 1983, as part of a Nintendo/Atari deal that never happened.
Nintendo did not release it in 1983/1984 as planned, but HAL eventually self-published in 1987…years later.
Joust was the first thing Satoru Iwata, the eventual president of Nintendo, ever coded for a Nintendo system.
…so this is the earliest known Iwata code for Nintendo.
This might, on a technicality, be the only known prototype of an unreleased first-party Nintendo game, too. It’s uh, pretty neat!
Believe it or not, this is only the best find of the bunch by circumstance. Cifaldi only discovered the existence of the eBay auction page JUST too late to purchase a prototype for Super Mario Bros. It went for $200!
Here are the auction photos. See how the text is scrolling in the third shot? That isn’t possible in the final game.
Follow Frank Cifaldi on Twitter.