Dragon Quest SNES Prototype Worth $50,000 "Lost For Good"

We need to normalize robbing people honestly

Avarice wins the day, yet again.

@PinballBuzzbro A video game repossession task force. They do it for rare art and archeological items. For the good of Game preservation we need one of those too.

Also need somebody to keep Nintendo in check but that's another post and topic entirely.

The entitlement here is something to behold. Yes, this localized prototype not being publicly available is unfortunate for video game enthusiasts, but it's not like it's impossible to get the Japanese version (and SNES) if you wanted to play it that much. Maybe the seller needs the money for medical bills. Maybe the buyer has been saving up for years to get this. As long the transaction was done legitimately, there's not that much to get worked up about.

@ZZalapski "Entitlement" is the word. The idea that selling one's own property to a willing buyer is the manifestation of greed is flatly absurd.

I love video games and I'm all for game preservation, but lets not act like people who are fortunate enough to come upon some rare piece of gaming are withholding insulin from diabetics.

It's a shame, but a fan translation exists, so it's not really that bad imo. If it was a completely original game, it would have been a lot more upsetting.

@ZZalapski If the seller wanted all that money they could’ve sold it to an archival foundation or museum, someone who’d actually benefit from having it by preserving it, and if the buyer was saving up money for it there are about 9 billion better things you could use 50,000 on, such as donating to charity, or buying something genuinely useful, or commissioning artists, or saving it up for future uses in life, not storing an important historical item on some dusty shelf like it’s a mounted elk head for christs sake. This mindset is like saying the burning of Alexandria was a good thing because “What else would they do with all that fire? Weapons are made to be used, after all”.

@PinballBuzzbro Your comparison of a hard-to-find but not wholly inaccessible video game to lost items of actual archeological value is hyperbolic, to say the least.
Do you like it when randos tell you what to do with your possessions or your money?

I always hate it when people sell these things without sharing the roms. Just selfish.

Not great news on the preservation front.

this isn't just a mystery dungeon game, but the very first one, predating Shiren the Wanderer and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon. it's a very cool piece of history! shame a private colector has it, but hey, at least it isn't in a basement in Miami or something. and like Nicolaus said, there is a fan translation of this and many other JP-only Mystery Dunegon games, which i highly recommend checking out

Good lord some of you are ravenous, get a grip. I'm sure gaming will survive if this prototype of a spinoff's localization, which has long been fan translated, isn't dumped and shared. The game is perfectly available and this could easily be a garbage localization given the time period. Acting like petulant children does the cause of video game preservation no favors.

While I’m not big on emulation, that’s disappointing as I’d love to go back and explore some of the older Mustery Dungeon games that didn’t see a local release.

To be fair if I owned it I’d sell it to the highest bidder at that sort of value. I wouldn’t release the rom for it either as it would likely devalue it.

why didnt they share the roms!? this stinks...

@GravyThief
You WOULD release the ROM as the value is NOT important, preservation is.

@ZZalapski It's not really hyperbolic. In officially translated form, it is a one-of-a-kind item. Sure, this game can be played in Japanese. Or you could use a translation that was made by fans. Fans who can write whatever they want.
But this translation would represent the official Enix take on this.

Sure the owner is free to do what they want with their possesesions.
The rest of us are free to comment on the owner letting this become a video game that only one person on the planet can play.
One person on the planet can play until the EEPROMs on the cartridge die, and then it becomes a video game nobody on the planet can play.

I'm not sure how this one-of-a-kind video game is different than "items of actual archeological value". It is because it's not centuries old?
What are the "items of actual archeological value" anyways? Like old pottery found buried in the ground or something? I don't know, seems like clay is still around. You can make those too.

Once again, the owner has the right to sell it and we have the right to discuss what we think of the sale.

@GravyThief Wait until you hear how the Sonic 1 Prototype sold for $13,000 AFTER it was dumped.

There's a funny David Sedaris quote about not agreeing with people until you found out who they voted for in 2016. That's how every response on this page makes me feel.

@Missingno128 if the value wouldn’t go down from releasing the rom, then sure. However, I wouldn’t risk it and let the new owner decide that.

@PigmaskFan £50k would be more important to me than preservation to make some random internet people happy.

Just get an english patched rom.

People are acting like someone bought the cure for cancer, and locked it in a vault.

This was publicly advertised on eBay, probably the biggest marketplace a regular Joe can access. First person with access to eBay and the cash could have walked away with it.

No successful crowd funding efforts. No "archival foundation or museum" rallied to the cause with cash in hand. Where the rubber meets the road nobody cared enough. The cries of preservation and free downloads far outweigh the offers to financially back such efforts.

We didn't have the rom before, we don't have it now. We haven't lost anything, we just know something that we don't have exists. I'm fine with that. The fan translation is almost certainly better than the official one from that era would be, anyway.

Not sure why everyone feels so entitled that they should have dumped the rom before selling it. They aren't under any obligation to do so and may not have had the means to do so. Also going out of their way to get it dumped would incur some kind of cost that they probable didn't want as they simply wanted to sell something they owned for the highest price. People are also saying that if the value dropped after the rom was dumped isn't important it's about preserving it. How do you know how important that money is to the seller and what it was needed for? Once again entitlement thinking a hobby of yours is possibly more important than something that could be happening in the sellers real life.

@NicolausCamp Indeed.

Hopefully the ROM gets dumped but if not oh well. Not like this is unplayable in any form like you said

My guess is the fan translation is better anyways, so let's not get our panties in a bunch.

Unfortunately, situations like this one are inevitable. There are so many of these things that some will remain in the hands of private collectors with no digital version available. Perhaps these collectors understand how precarious the situation is because of the nature of data that they have dumped the ROM, even if it's not made available.

Regarding the notion of making the ROM available affecting the value, I highly doubt that applies here. The sale prices of stuff like this are so high that it's purely collector value. People simply interested in playing this would not be willing to spend so much. Preservationist groups might be able to approach those numbers, but they have to pool their money each time to make offers and probably can't go back and forth with bidding. It doesn't appear as if those groups have any significant effect on sale prices. That just leaves the handful of collectors with large amounts of money to spend, and they're bidding against each other. If there's any effect on value from outside that bubble, it's likely tiny. It's not like when Radiant Silvergun was hard to come by and the Saturn version was several hundred dollars. It was still low enough that some gamers might go for it at those prices. That's where a digital version could hurt collector value. For this, it's a totally different situation.

@KingMike That's right, people are free to rail against the perceived injustice of this transaction. And I am free to remark how that argument seems rather silly.
The meaning of archeology is "the study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains". (So the value of buried pottery isn't about the pottery itself, but the information it can convey about how people in ancient civilizations lived.) Applying that context to video games, what exactly is the valuable information that's being held from the masses with this game remaining in private ownership? The "official" English translation from a language spoken by over 120 million people? I'd guess that at least a few hundred thousand of those are as adept with English as whoever Square Enix hired; this isn't Sanskrit we're talking about here.
If this kind of triviality is enough to prompt people to go <indianajones-thatbelongsinamuseum.gif>, well, I guess I don't have the capacity to care about video games to that same extent.

it's a click bait title that for sure. If its in a private collection it just that. We don't say art is lost when it's in a private collection.

Just get the fan patch from romhacking dot... this has been a bad couple of weeks huh?

@Zenszulu Who the ***** even care's about the hypothetical finacial situation of the seller when this is clearly an item that he/she shouldn't even have in the first place and there's no way that person doesn't know it. Preservation wise it's a good thing that these thing's leak but no one should be able to make tons of money by selling something that was illegally sold in the first place.

@Kuruwin thanks for proving my point about entitlement. Also it doesn't say they ever purchased it it the first place just who play tested it and once old office building get shut down these things often get left behind or even the person that play tested it was never asked to return it and they just gave it to some one. You are making a hypothetical situation up yourself that it was sold illegal all those years ago. It says nothing about the person who had it in their possession being any kind of collector and just because you personally not caring about their possible situation doesn't mean that isn't the reason behind it. You seem to have really wanted to go out your way to prove you feel more entitled to it being preserved though once again thank you for proving my point.

@sdelfin Good post, and regarding your Radiant Silvergun example: that game is now widely available on multiple platforms, recent Steam and Switch ports can be purchased digitally, the Japanese physical Switch cart is still in print, Saturn emulation is excellent these days, Saturn system mods and "repro" copies are more common than ever... and Saturn Radiant Silvergun still sells for hundreds of dollars despite it being trivially easy to play the game for anyone who would like to do so.

That's consistent with what usually happens - for another example, Samurai Shodown V Special on Neo Geo AES cart is worth MORE now than it was before the release of the now readily available releases of the game PS4, Switch, and PC. (I know because I sold one at market price before those ports existed, for hundreds of dollars less than it typically sells for now lol)

People getting this upset over a private sale of a video game of all things and calling it "greed" really really need to go outside and touch grass.