Treasure Trove Of Roughly 300 Undumped GBA, DS, DSi And 3DS Beta Carts Is At Risk

I'm gonna get heat from this but...the whole about thing about game preservation isn't all rainbows and gold. There's always going to be problems when it comes to game preservation. Not when copyrights, greed, and the cost of maintaining servers putting a strain on many options.

And at this point...are people really preserving games out genuine desire? But aside from this...I just don't care about game preservation very much I'll admit. I preserve of what i want to preserve particularly and specifically. I'll leave the job preserving every game, beta games and gamebuilds to someone else. Sorry to be blunt but at this point I don't care. But the good thing is that everyone else can. though I will say film preservation is much easier than games themselves.

'Bloke intends to be selfish for cash' might be a more appropriate headline

@LJW1912 Pretty much why the seller backed out from the deal. Other people were contacting said seller were offering more tempting amount of money seems like.

Honestly...at the end of the story greed from both sides will always ruin everything. If I was the one who had those carts and everything...and they offered me that amount...I'd sell it to them in a heartbeat. i could live comfortably with that amount & never be late on rent & bills

If there's money to made you can bet people will bid for the highest value.

Interesting to see real numbers thrown around. If the guy turned down £25,000 then I wonder what this third party is paying, and what their intentions are.

and the Video Game Darwin Award goes to....

no No NO NO NO NO

@N64-ROX £25,000.01

@DanijoEX-The-Kumiho I am actually one who preserves without the need of money being thrown at my crotch from micropenises. It's sad how this happened but in the end you know who to trust and not to trust. The seller is no longer trustworthy after backing off. I hope that new deal falls through or the buyer screws the seller as it would be kinda deserved at this point.

Sadly it happens. It's got to be already like five years or so since western game preservationists lost out on an obscure undumped Famicom RPG when it was listed on Yahoo! Auctions because one rich Japanese seller felt the need to "protect" the game from bootlegs the only way they knew how: by ensuring nobody else can play the game, ever. Or even them, whenever the EEPROMs in the cart eventually fail. The equivalent of $15k to cockblock westerners who would've saved it. It was said that even other Japanese game fans didn't like that. Though with copyright laws there, it probably is the way to go.

I mean do they actually have to buy them to dump them?

They can verify the data, dump the roms, photograph, doccument and sign an affidavit(s) on the carts in question!

It would actually ensure that the games being sold to the buyers are genuine and everyone wins here.

It's not that difficult folks.... the publishers are already greedy enough.... why does this end of the industry have to be sp money motivated. When this stuff goes missing or burned up in a house fire or any other numerous things can happen.... they will be lost to time like so many other things!!!

There’s not a lot of information to go on here. I’m actively involved in film preservation and this kind of thing is standard. The worst people are the ones who have something that’s one of a kind and refuse to share, or even worse, don’t bother storing their film reels properly. A lot of the time, owners sit on their property in the stubborn belief that it’s worth more than it really is. Earl Owensby is a recent example. He died the owner of a huge collection of B films that were never made available because of his idea that they were worth a fortune. They’re now slowly being handed out by his estate who realised quite quickly that the collection wasn’t a financial gold mine.

You can’t blame the seller for wanting to get the best price; that’s why they’re selling in the first place. The main hope is that the new buyer treats them with respect.

And as someone above pointed out, the seller is now marked as unreliable. This will definitely make people wary of doing business with them.

To clarify, the seller has reached out with a new offer today, and we're hoping to talk later tonight.

This info was already public prior to us attempting to save, which made things more complex.

I don't blame the seller for wanting more, but it will require a major community effort to get this preserved.

We're in talks with other preservation groups who will attempt to help raise any funds. More will be shared on our X as we find out. (Or via the OG Discord)

@ TX, i've used our company email to prove this is a legitimate account.

20 years ago, I owned a weird Moon Cresta variant arcade cabinet. All the cabinet artwork and title screen did everything they could to pretend some random mortgage insurance company had made it. Gameplay was slightly different. I did not have the resources to dump the ROMs. I approached MAME devs and "game preservationists" and got mocked at even wanting the cost of shipping to send them the PCBs. I posted it for sale/trade as "not in MAME" and got mocked again. (for an astounding $100 IIRC) All I had was a crummy digital camera, so there's a few miscategorized pictures on KLOV. Whoever runs that website couldn't be bothered to read my emails asking him to put them under the correct entry.

Anyway, read this article with great amusement.

Is there no way right now to see what the games are beyond Rhythm Thief?

When I was a kid there was a GBA game I was looking forward to that got cancelled in 2006, the general assumption is that the game was finished because it received a T rating in the ESRB site.

Every now and then I hope that one day that rom leaks.

I wonder if laws would change if someone took things far enough, like made a YouTube channel all about rage-bait by documenting themselves buying rare games and destroying them for the clicks. Maybe even expand into artwork/etc.

i don't get it. perhaps the article has failed to explain the significance here? which of these carts are valuable and worth preserving? most of these carts are common other than the rythm thief (ds) cart, which we got ported to the 3ds anyways, yes? i won't be losing any sleep over this haha.

@Porco they are early prototypes, not retail releases.

I get not everyone sees the importance, but if you had an early draft of say the first Harry Potter or The Hobbit there would likely be a number of differences to the published books which would be of interest to many.