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The Hidden Palace is a community dedicated to the preservation of video game development media (such as prototypes, hardware, source code, artwork, and more). This website can be utilized as a catalog for the items that we and others are able to collect and share.

If you are interested in contributing, please see our How to Contribute page.

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Merry (S)NESMas! 🎄

For the first day of NESMas, Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation brought us a lot of video game prototypes purchased from an estate sale of Steven McKay, who had once been the General Manager of Nintendo’s Mexico division.

McKay Auction.png

The vast majority of the Nintendo prototypes were acquired by Josh Hamblin, who runs SideQuest Games and is one of the organizers for the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Josh goes more into the back story in a Metal Jesus YouTube video:

Josh has graciously agreed to release the prototypes he acquired after having them graded. He submitted his prototypes to WATA, which provides a service to authenticate, grade, and encapsulate video games in a tamper-proof case. Grading services have been popular in other collecting hobbies, such as coins and cards. With video game collecting becoming more and more popular, grading has arrived to the video games.

WATA case.jpg

Typically, collectors opt to grade rare retail video games, but WATA also offers this service for prototypes, and although it authenticates whether they are legitimate or not, they do not receive a specific grade out of 10. Prototypes, however, are pretty tough to authenticate, thus WATA has turned to Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation, who is one of the foremost experts on prototype media, having been in the game for decades, and having handled untold numbers of prototypes himself.

A little known fact is that Frank stipulated that all of his prototype authentication research is eventually made public, which accomplishes a win-win between collectors and prototype enthusiasts. We’re happy to announce that in addition to today’s prototype release, we are also starting to document WATA metadata for their prototype submissions on the wiki.

WATA graded prototypes

This includes prototypes that have not had their ROMs releases! WATA does not release ROMs unless they receive explicit permission from the submitter. However, the metadata and authentication text will now be publicly available.

Here are the prototypes from the Josh Hamblin collection. Thanks again to Josh and the Frank Cifaldi for providing these for release!

Josh Hamblin has also agreed to release two Sega Genesis prototypes in his collection that were not in the auction – Beyond Zero Tolerance and Dominus.

But that’s not all! Some of the prototypes were bought by Josh Byerly, who also gratiously offered to have his released!


But wait, there’s more gifts!

Finally, Frank himself bought a few of the auctioned prototypes and he is also releasing those today! This includes a US localization of Chester Field which has not been released until now, a more completed version of the unreleased game Titan Warriors (which is really fun and has an awesome sountrack by the way!), as well as a previously unreleased NTSC version of Trolls in Crazyland.

Huge thanks to Josh Hamblin, Josh Byerly, 🎅 Frank Cifaldi for today’s presents!

(psst the VGHF takes donations!)

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s release for more NES goodies!

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