Two Unreleased NES Games Have Turned Up On eBay

The second game is where the real mystery lies. This unassuming cartridge, marked as “CES SAMPLE” (before E3 took off, the Consumer Electronics Show was the big annual event for games as well) and as having come from Rare, is for a demo of a game developed specifically for the Nintendo Power Glove.

There weren’t many of those, with only two games ever being released with specific Power Glove support (one of them, Super Glove Ball, also having been developed by Rare). This would have been a third. Nobody in the public has ever seen or played this game, with no physical or digital dumps having ever made it out into the wild.

We do have some hints as to what it was about, though; Rare’s James Thomas put out a call earlier today for information on the demo, and was told by former programmer Paul Byford that he recalls it “was a puzzle game where the cursor was a disembodied hand and you made different gestures to complete tasks. Punching rocks or turning keys etc.”

That makes preservation of the game pretty damn important, which is why the Video Game History Foundation are trying to secure the funds needed to get hold of the cartridge. As Cifaldi said on Twitter earlier today, though, while this is exactly the kind of thing the organisation would normally purchase, at the moment “our resources are stretched thin, and we could use help”.

If you want to help, you can DM Cifaldi on Twitter, and you can “discuss tax-deductible options if you’re in the U.S.” while you’re at it. He says he already has around $4000 in pledges from people, but given the rarity of both games, and the insanity of the market for this kind of stuff in these broken times, there’s no guarantee that will be enough.