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Extremely rare and 'previously undocumented' Pokémon Red prototype cartridge surfaces at auction, starting at $25,000

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Extremely rare and 'previously undocumented' Pokémon Red prototype cartridge surfaces at auction, starting at $25,000

A rare, prototype copy of Pokémon Red for the Nintendo Game Boy, originally released back in 1998, is on sale at auction, with a single bid of $25,000 currently registered so far. This prototype, spotted by Retro Dodo, is "incredibly rare" and features 32KB of readable data. According to the Goldin auction page, the cartridge has been authenticated by specialists at PSA, who examined the card. According to them, while a "complete data read" wasn't possible, the first 32KB of data was, a "technically unique" result. The PSA notes, however, that the game data is otherwise "completely identical" to the U.S. release version of the game, with PSA "expressing confidence" that the rest of the data, if it were readable, would match.

The PSA report does note two changes to the ROM's header data that don't affect the game data. According to PSA, "the difference is at offset 0x014C, which denotes the Mask ROM version and is incorrectly set to 55 when it should be 00. This has the effect of changing offset 0x014D, which is a calculated header checksum, to CB instead of 20."

This prototype development cartridge has a sticker reading DMB-MBC-16M-FLASH, with a part number DMG-(F)KGDB-01. DMB likely refers to Dot Matrix Game , the original internal codename for the Game Boy, while MBC likely means Memory Bank Controller, a custom chip that allowed games to use more than the Game Boy's 32KB ROM limit. 16M likely refers to a 16 megabit limit of flash-writable memory.


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