Only English Final Fantasy 2 NES Cartridge On Sale for $50K 109
Croakyvoice writes "In what seems to be the 'in thing' at the moment comes another auction to add to last month's Zelda NES auction and that crazy million dollar collection. This time, for RPG fans, this could be classed as the Holy Grail of NES games. The game in question is Final Fantasy 2, which was never released outside of Japan, but luckily for the person who at this time is selling this on eBay for 50K, there was one made for the 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by SquareSoft. Sadly, the U.S. version never had a release because they decided to work on the Super NES instead."
Re:FF1 just ported to Android... (Score:5, Informative)
FF2 has been available on iOS for a couple years now.
Re:Does anyone know if... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. The person auctioning the cart dumped it himself. (It's Frank Cifaldi, who's a pretty well-known video game historian and journalist.) While doing so kills the market value, Frank Cifaldi believes more highly in the preservation of prototypes and betas than in maintaining the value by letting a cartridge languish in a box and degrade.
I believe his site, Lost Levels (lostlevels.org) in fact offers the ROM for download for preservation purposes.
The translation is kind of rough, but I suppose we shouldn't be surprised.
Re:I suspect this is a fake (Score:4, Informative)
They did. IT was on display at CES. The translation features Nintedoisms like censoring the religious symbology and so forth.
It's Frank Cifaldi. The dump's authentic.
Now Bio Force Ape... That's going to be one hell of a sale.
Re:50k is not the selling price (Score:5, Informative)
That doesn't mean that its any less entertaining, but its a staged show bringing in far more interesting things than what the average pawn shop owner would ever see in their lifetime.
Re:Definitely Unfinished (Score:5, Informative)
"Guy" is the character's name.
Re:Old NES translations (Score:5, Informative)
Those were fan-created translations. This one was official.
Re:Does anyone know if... (Score:3, Informative)
Q: Can you please upload to ROM online, so the world can play it? There is no way publisher will release this, and if you don't it could be lost to time: Forever.
A: OK, I did it (9 years ago).
So, it looks like he dumped and uploaded the ROM as soon as he acquired the cart.