eBay seller: Zelda III NES cart is real

by Conrad Quilty-Harper on Oct 21st 2005 9:00AM

Remember that dubious looking eBay auction which claimed to be an unreleased Zelda 3 game for NES? Now that the auction has gone down Richard (the owner), decided to get ahold of a NES console and test the cartridge. He managed to successfully boot the game and play around with it for a bit. The game is very buggy, which is to be expected from a game that is only around 50-60% complete.

Richard has promised to put gameplay shots up on his site as soon as possible. Right now he's unsure about what to do with the game, now that its legitimacy is proven. One commenter on his site suggests that the last thing he should do is stash the game away in his collection. Instead he should rip it onto a ROM and distribute it, then either sell the cart or donate it to a museum. What do you think he should do with it?

[Thanks, dragon.feces]

Source

Reader Comments (70)

I'm just going to say one thing:
If The Game is in English, Its Fake.

Not tell Jack Thompson!

ROM it, so every one can see if it's for real...

I agree with CapAmerica, but the main title "Zelda" in English is expected. The supporting text should be in Japanese.

If i were him, I'd rip the ROM file, then sell it. I'd keep the ROM file private tho.
Then let the buyer do whatever he wants with it. If he doesnt distribute the ROM, do it yourself. That way, everyone gets the ROM file, and you get your money :)

Rip to ROM and archive.

I think its too early to confirm this game as real. That pic is very blurry and could easaly have been done in Mario Paint. I dont think the colors looks very NESish either.
Now that he have access to a camera, why didnt he just take some in-game screenshots at the same time?

No, I wont belive this until i see some clearly in-game screenshots or a ROM dump.

I still don't believe him. Its possible that its real, but that could easily just be a file on a computer with tv out hooked up. The problem is, its really tough to prove that something like this is real. Especially since no one has seen pics of the circuit board.

That Atari 2600 game had indeed been semi-validated over on AtariAge.com by one of the mods. This? Not so much.

notice his MSN profile says he owns 8 NES consoles, yet the auction said he did not have one to test. The guy is an obvious video game nut, this sounds like a scam the more you look at it.

Maybe it's a hacked version of the NES Zeldas then put onto an NES cart..

Or he is running the hack off an emulator and feeding it to the tv. That's how I play emulators. :P

Consider this:

Why would he have that UNFINISHED game?

Why would he have that and nobody else that we know of in the "gaming community"?

Do that or ask nintendo about an unreleased "Zelda 3", and give them a good laugh.

This guy has a working english copy of a Zelda 3 beta on an actual NES cart in Manitoba, Canada? Please try harder next time.

I can't wait to see how ridiculous the "actual" screenshots look like after he's done making them in MS paint.

The complete title seems to be:

The Legend of Zelda� - The Triforce Saga - �1990 Nintendo

The third Zelda game was "A Link to the Past", released in 1991 on the SNES. In Japan, it's called "Kamigami no Triforce", which means "Triforce of the Gods". Could this be a beta version of A Link to the Past - for the NES?

great the site is already not available, stupid msn spaces.

"Could this be a beta version of A Link to the Past - for the NES?"

Why would someone in canada have a BETA of Zelda ALTTP for NES when it was never released??? Who the fuck is he to claim that he has it? Not like he's a nintendo representative.

#14, if you'd bothered to read the original post you'd know he claimed to have bought it at a flea market. Who knows whether that's true, but it's not like he's claiming it just appeared out of thin air.

Random beta cartidges show up in strange places. Nintendo Power itself ran a short article a few months ago about a SimCity NES beta cartridge found at the back of a clogged up drawer at NOA HQ. If carts are getting lost at the back of drawers, there's no reason they couldn't make it out of the building.

Just watch. All of the text will be in English instead of Japanese.

FYI, I can clearly make out some Japanese characters ('n' 'hi'...)--aside from the Zelda title, one occurence of "N," and the "F" that appears twice, it is Japanese text.

"FYI, I can clearly make out some Japanese characters ('n' 'hi'...)--aside from the Zelda title, one occurence of "N," and the "F" that appears twice, it is Japanese text."

No it isn't. Look closer.
Top: "The Legend of"
Bottom: "The Triforce Saga"
Very Bottom: "[illegible] Nintendo"

I've played it, I give it a 1/10 It's obvious nintendo wasn't thinking straight. They turned Link into a woman =/

This person has no credibility. He originally said that he didn't test the cart because he didn't have an NES, and didn't have time to find one because he was a "very busy man." If you click on the "my games" link on his page, you find out that he owns a mind boggling number of games from numerous systems, including NES. He was obviously lying about not having time for playing around with games, and lying about not having an NES. So why should we believe him about the cart.

I emailed Nintendo. We'll see.

did anyone read the last thread about this? zelda III on the NES is what eventually became Link's Awakening. there's a link in the last entry that explains all about this.

actually, i'll go ahead and repost the URL since i fear that many are too lazy to go back and find it.

http://www.ratedo.com/articles/z3proto.html

He should dump it and then sell the cart, then release the ROMs. Or only sell the proto to someone who will dump and release it. Not like these greedy bastards that dosn't release unreleased games/protos.

You really need to take into account the fact that there are Zelda ROM editors out there. I think it was on this site, that the Final Fantasy X was mentioned (which is just a modified Final Fantasy III ROM). Modifying NES ROMs has been around for awhile now. Also there are sites that show how to make your own NES cart. I remember awhile back a group was making GTA for NES and they made their own cart.

I don't know why a beta for Zelda III (a Japanese game) would even appear on an American cart. Nintendo of America only worked on the localization and marketing of that game in America. They never worked on the developement and if there was an NES beta screenshots would have been on the Internet awhile ago like there are for other Zelda games and other video games.

I've played it, I give it a 1/10 It's obvious nintendo wasn't thinking straight. They turned Link into a woman =/

"I don't know why a beta for Zelda III (a Japanese game) would even appear on an American cart."

---Exactly what I was thinking. The american carts/NES were different than the japanese Famicom. There's no reason what-so-ever that this should be an NES title in an NES cart.

Smart way to rob a man though.

Too true... Game development would be done on a Famicom cart, not on an NES cart. This is bogus.

Seriously.

lol @ "not tell jack thompson" ahahah

but yeah rip it to prove to everyone ELSE that it is legit. i think i must agree with the "if it's in english it's fake" comment.

ROM it so someone can finish it and everyone can enjoy it.

What's Richard (the owner)URL to his website?

""I don't know why a beta for Zelda III (a Japanese game) would even appear on an American cart."

---Exactly what I was thinking. The american carts/NES were different than the japanese Famicom. There's no reason what-so-ever that this should be an NES title in an NES cart."

Think about this, It could have been sent over as a "treat" to get the people at NOA fired up ,or a early start on translating the game. Oh and the NES and Famicom where not that much diffrent internally(as seen by the famicom-to-NES converter plugs.

The only thing I can think of is that NOA somehow got the go ahead to develop their own Zelda.

Still, I'm calling Hoax on this whole thing. Besides, the Zelda logo didn't look like that until the Third installment on the SNES. Even if this was a beta for the third game... it's just a hoax. Nintendo would've mentioned something.

If what mercatfat says is true, it makes sense...
That title screen does appear similar to the title screen from Link's Awakening. Even more similar to the title screen of the colourised Link's Awakening DX.

I've never seen any evidence to suggest such a game was ever being developed. With such a popular title, you would think sometime during the past decade information about such would have been brought up at least once.

Oh, and I have teh complete Cowering NES Romset here. Do you have any idea how many hacks and modifications there are of the Zelda1 and 2 roms? Tons. Just browsing I see a "Zelda 3 Adventure of Link". I will extract them all and test them today and report back with my results.

on his website, it said he had 8 nes consoles.

Reasons it's fake

-English

-as far as I'm aware beta versions don't have 'NTSC' or 'PAL' on them as they

-the subtitle goes offscreen, even in beta that would be a pretty strange thing

-it would be big news if a Zelda game got this close to being complete and remained unreleased and unannounced. Pretty weird it's been kept quiet and not finished as a gbc game or a compilation pack bonus

Yes! make it a ROM and let me use it on my NEStron/Nesticle. that will verify its authenticity as well.

Toltal fake. #34 has numerus reasons why it is fake.

Mainly that subtitle, and the sloppy grapics.

jesus christ, read the url i posted.

the legitimate copy that the author of that article i had came on a grey cart, so it's really not THAT hard to believe.

reposting for those with itchy commenting fingers:
http://www.ratedo.com/articles/z3proto.html

1. First of all -- hate to nitpick, but the title of this blog entry should have a colon (:), not a semicolon. Just a tip because it seems confusing and meaningless how it is now.

2. Second, the guy on the site http://www.ratedo.com/articles/z3proto.html gives no sources for his amazing information on Zelda III whatsoever, aside from supposedly owning a prototype. Even then, he would be only guessing about the history of the game if the prototype he owns was his only source of knowledge. It's very easy to create a webpage and blather on for three pages about something you completely made up.

3. Based on everyone else's astute analysis of the guy (formerly) selling the cart on ebay, this Zelda III prototype is definitely, 100% BS. If I'm wrong you can stab me in the gut and call me Sally.

Well, the auction has been cancelled.

It was a fake.
The screen shot is obviously taken from Link's Awakening. The Wind Fish egg is removed from the mountain top and a triforce is added.

The cartridge was labeled previosuly. You can still see the left over glue.

Looks real to me, Im a member on the nsider forums.
its quite interesting. odd that it is in English though. oh well. Just dont tell jack thompson about it.

on his ebay auction that got dumped today, the seller claimed that he didn't have a "fancy NES screwdriver" to open the game with and show the circuit board. FAIL. any old phillips-head will do.

this, along with all other evidence to the contrary, has convinced me that this cart is a FAKE.

Look at the blurry picture, it looks like the only thing in English is the "Zelda" itself the rest looks like japanese symbols. (sorry their name fell out of my vocabulary for the moment)

The text is in english. Look closely. It's fairly easy to read.

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eBay seller: Zelda III NES cart is real

Reader Comments (70)

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