The creator of the Video Game History Foundation, Frank Cifaldi, has announced yesterday on social media that the 501(c)3 non-profit organization has recently come into possession of 125 mystery prototype ROMs, which are believed to originally be from Taito Japan.
And, better yet, the non-profit will be doing a livestream in a week's time (on June 5th) where it will be dumping and analyzing their contents live on stream.
According to Cifaldi, he does not know what games are actually included in this lot, only that they are mostly for the Famicom/NES and MSX2, and that Taito had "multiple unreleased and lost NES/Famicom games from this era". As a result, he has "reason to suspect" that there may at least be one in here.
Though, with that being said, he doesn't anticipate the process will be easy, stating in a follow-up to the original announcement on BlueSky:
"Puzzling these together is going to be rough! Most aren't marked at all, and even when they are, they often don't have dates or game names. There are 125 chips, and a functioning game needs an exact matching set of maybe 3-8 (depending on the title). [There's] no guarantee we have even one complete set!"
This live stream will be the non-profit's second of the year, following this month's Mailbag Mountain stream, which saw Cifaldi and Digital Eclipse's editorial director Chris Kohler unbox and scan nearly 1000 pounds of old video game magazines. At the end of that stream, Cifaldi showed off some of the ROMs he had acquired from a Japanese auction site, teasing that he intended to hold a second livestream to see what he could discover.
You can sign up to be alerted when the livestream goes live over on YouTube. We also recommend checking out the organization's website, to find out some of the other ways you can support their efforts to save game history.