After a $16,000 auction, a canceled Konami NES game is feared lost forever
Nov. 15, 2023After 35 years, the world finally got to see Battle Choice, but it may never be seen again
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A long-lostKonamigame called Battle Choice just made its public debut 35 years after it was quietly canceled, but after a $16,000 auction many fear that the game might now be lost forever.
Battle Choice was in development at Konami around 1988 for the Famicom, the Japanese version of the NES. It was a hybrid of shogi (a Japanese game similar to chess) and fighting game. Basically, you’d play it as a board game up until the point where one piece was supposed to capture another, and then you’d play out the fight in real-time action to see which piece wins.
That’s why it was quite a shock when a prototype cartridge for Battle Choice suddenly appeared on aYahoo! Japan auction, complete with a few images of the game up and running. This marks the first time anyone who wasn’t working at Konami in the late ’80s has ever even seen a screenshot of the game.
Unfortunately, it seems likely that if the high bidder wasn’t working with the VGHF - one of the most prominent game preservation bodies out there - it’s more likely that a private collector now has the game. While some collectors of unreleased games work closely with historians to make sure the content of these cartridges is preserved so that everyone can have access to it, others have developed a reputation for hoarding away their treasures, refusing to allow ROMs to be copied from the original cartridge for fear that it will diminish the value of the physical item. Many observers are assuming that’s the likely fate of Battle Choice.
Game preservation is already a tricky topic, but the secret answer is that most commercially released games have already been preserved thanks to piracy. If Battle Choice ends up languishing in a collector’s house, it won’t even get that inauspicious chance at life, which is a shame for something that seems like a genuinely fascinating historical curiosity.
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