$60,000 Buys a Hidden Punch-Out Prototype That Now Belongs to Everyone

An interesting story unfolded in the world of classic Nintendo games just yesterday, and it has already sent shockwaves across all of the retro gaming groups. A mysterious buyer paid $60,000 for a cartridge containing an early prototype of Punch-Out for the NES, and here’s where things get interesting. Rather than simply taking this unusual find home and storing it, the buyer collaborated with the Video Game History Foundation to extract the game data and upload the entire ROM online.

Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation created a video walkthrough that takes you through every nook and cranny of the build, demonstrating how different it feels from the final product that fans all remember. TThe cartridge itself bears a mock-up label in Nintendo’s traditional black-box style, along with a plainly mismatched product code stamped on the mask ROM chips inside. This indicates that these chips are not the same as the rewritable Eproms often seen in test cartridges, hinting at a more advanced stage of testing than most prototypes reach.

So in this build, you only receive four boxers on the roster, and they appear in a predetermined order that never changes. Glass Joe enters the ring first, followed by Bald Bull, King Hippo, and Don Flamenco. Finish the match against Don Flamenco, and the screen cuts to a training sequence in which Little Mac appears in his humble training gear – then a password appears, and the entire loop begins again, with Glass Joe waiting in the wings. That’s it; there is no one else on the roster, and forget about Mike Tyson; this build predates his involvement.

You’ll be playing through this entire thing in complete silence because none of the code that’s supposed to manage music sound effects and speech clips made it into this release, so all of the matches are just a constant beat with no notes or grunts to be heard. The pre-match graphics lack some of the text that fans expect, and the major title bout announcement never appears after a streak of victories. For example, Bald Bull lacks the dramatic bull charge animation that he became famous for later on, while some other fighters rely on placeholder animations that are simply a couple of lines created initially for Glass Joe and replayed over and again.

One of the fun aspects of this build is that there are some hidden debug settings that allow players to take control of opponents who have never received a full programming treatment and cycle through their movesets at will. Yes, the controls cause some strange visual abnormalities, but they also open up a portal to characters who vanished before the game’s release. For example, if you select a fighter named Von Kaiser, all you get is a simple animation test while the credits roll, listing some of the names that have changed over time. Vodka Drunkenski appears where Soda Popinski would eventually be, Piston Hurricane replaces Piston Honda, and there are two additional submissions, Pizza Pasta Rockyhead and Mongol Khan, neither of which made it into the final game.