"I've Never Seen It Like This" - This New Punch Is Just Released!!NES Prototype Stumbles Historian |Time Dilation

Previous Tyson Versions Now Dumped Online - Rare Pre-Mike Tyson Prototype of Nintendo's 1987 NES Game Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!Appeared online,…

A rare pre-Mike Tyson copy of Nintendo's 1987 NES title, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, has surfaced online, providing a "surprising" look at the early development of the first Nintendo game, while spoofing historians in the process.

A prototype NES cartridge was shown off yesterday in a video uploaded to the Video Game History Foundation's YouTube channel, with foundation founder and director Frank Cifaldi saying, "I've never seen anything like it" in more than 25 years of working with and studying NES prototypes.

In the video, he documents some of the interesting features that make the prototype so interesting, from the early days of the NES, the "house style of Nintendo in America" ​​and the fact that the sun mask appears to be printed on ROM, which was common on EPROM at the time.The latter is something you typically see in retail products, Cifaldi said, raising unanswered questions about why the cartridge was made in the future.

As Cifaldi points out, most NES prototypes are also usually very similar to the finished game, while this version seems to have a lot of noticeable differences from the retail versions we've seen before.For starters, the roster of fighters during the intro is different, with Piston Hurricane and Pizza Pasta included from the original 1984 arcade game.The Piston Hurricane would eventually be replaced by the Piston Honda in the NES game, while the Pizza Past would be completely absent from the final game.

Soda Popinski from Super Punch Out!!also appears under his original name, Vodka Drunkenski, which was changed for marketing reasons, while two mysterious and unknown fighters, Rockyhead and Mongolian Khan, also appear.

Despite this list, you can only really fight in the game with four characters - Glass Joe, Bald Ball, King Hippo and Don Flamenco - Von Kaiser and Big Tiger are also present, but very incomplete.

According to The Cutting Room Floor, which has examined and documented the prototype's contents, an early build was found earlier this year in a garage believed to belong to a former Nintendo of America employee.It was sold at an antique auction for $45,000 to an anonymous user, leading some to fear it would be sealed away from the public forever, but the new owner has allowed people to not only study the ROM, but also release it online for all to see.

In addition to the change in the intro, the early build also features a single-ring palette, lacks audio, has different victory and game-over screens, and includes various altered statistics for the fighters.

You can see the full list of changes here, courtesy of xkeeper and The Cutting Room Floor.