Preserving Unreleased NES Games is Hard.

And by hard I guess I mean expensive.

Last week, something remarkable happened: an unreleased NES (well, technically Famicom) game from the golden age of Konami, which was thought to be completely lost, showed up on a Japanese auction site!

This is "Battle Choice," a title from which we had never even seen screenshots! In fact, we only knew about the game's existence because Konami sold its (total banger) soundtrack in a now extremely-out-of-print box set.

Their (text-only! they probably don't have the game either!) description makes it sound kinda like Archon-meets-shogi-meets-goofy-Konami.

This cartridge is possibly one-of-a-kind, the only surviving copy of the game. I'm no stranger to bidding on unreleased NES games on the open market, having purchased my first handful of these, oh, nearly twenty-two years ago, so I had a plan for something like this coming up!

About a year ago I started a private list of donors who were willing to throw down smaller sums toward the preservation of unreleased games like this, people I can call on without risking drawing attention to the auction from those who might bid against me...typically, these days anyway, collectors looking for an investment piece. And unfortunately for accessible video game history, some of these investors believe that a game like this loses value if others can play it. And I'm sorry to say that so far, the evidence says they're right. Please don't shoot the messenger, I don't like it either!

I had no idea what to expect from the end price, I never do, so in these situations I raise the bar as high as I possibly can and hope the end price doesn't come near the pledges I'm getting. Plus I only collect after the fact, so there's only a bookkeeping headache if I win (I was doing this privately and fronting my personal savings to cover the cost, this is a little beyond VGHF's monetary scope). I'm proud to say that my private platoon of pledgers got us all the way up to $16,000 in smaller individual contributions to save the game! But it just wasn't enough, and due to the way Yahoo! Japan Auctions operates, the winner got it for about $7 more than our combined bid.

I have no idea who won this thing, but $16k is a pretty obscene amount. I believe this is the second-highest amount of money ever paid for an unreleased game. My totally uneducated guess is that this went to a Japanese collector who will keep the data private...I don't know of any big spenders investing in Famicom yet, and I'd like to think I have a grasp on who all the preservationist bidders are by now.

I've been mulling this over all day, ever since I woke up at 4:30 to watch the auction end and couldn't get myself back to sleep because of it. I don't have any regrets, I can't think of anything I could have done differently:

• I don't think I could have raised any more money than this using the private resources that I have
• I don't think spending the VGHF's cash reserves on a five-figure video game is an appropriate use of your donations to us, we can do a LOT more with $16k than one video game
• I don't think going public with the fundraising would be a good idea. I mentioned earlier that this is the second-highest an unreleased game has ever gone for...our first place winner was a game I publicly fundraised for, which drew headlines from blogs and got incredibly viral and I'm convinced sold for about $12,000 more than it would have if I'd kept my mouth shut
• I do not believe there is any way to somehow make unreleased, un-preserved games less appealing to high end collectors, I think this is a market reality we have to work around

I think the only lesson here is "these things are just expensive, and they're becoming rarer as time passes." I consider myself an expert on the subject, at least for NES. I have watched these prices rise at a pretty consistent clip for almost 25 years now, and I've watched their buyers evolve. Around the year 2000, they ran up to about $1,000 a piece, and went to video game enthusiast collectors pretty much exclusively. By 2010 they crawled their way up to about $5,000-6,000, when a trend emerged where some collectors would create (totally unlicensed and illegitimate, but still kinda neat) copies of unreleased games to sell to each other, these "repros" now being an ironically hot collectible in their own right. And today, as I said, the buyers tend to be either long-term investors speculating on what the next "million dollar sealed Mario" might be or, as I suspect was the case here, Japanese collectors keeping their cultural heritage local and private.