Prototype SIMCITY for NES: not a rumor anymore

[lendelin]

No, I don't have it; but a rumor is confirmed.

In the recent Nintendo Power, which got a major facelift, there is a "Collecting" section (half a page).

They described the gold NWC cartridge, but also Sim City for the NES (with a pic of the game in a gold cartridge, vol. 193, p. 107):

The prototype is in the offices of NP.

Quote: "For a good long while, N had the publishing rights to the Sim City series, and developed a handful of games. What makes this one special is that it never saw the light of the day. While far along in development, the game was, unfortunately, canceled. As you can see here, the ROM is nestled comfortably into a gold The Adventures of Link cartridge! This gem item is most likely one of a kind."

Text for the screenshot: "Sim City for the NES plays much like the original PC version, but there are some slight differences, most noticeably in the menus. The game was never released because of bad timing."

Still uncertainty how many of the prototype actually exist.

The game is listed in the NES 'Rumor Mill' section of the DP guide. Since the existence of the prototype is now confirmed by N itself with a picture, it should probably be shifted to the 'Prototype' section.

Just thought this is interesting info. Now you hardcore collectors have some other holy grail to hunt down. :)

[SoulBlazer]

Yes, I remember reading that the game was going to be ported to the NES. The 'bad timing' they mention is that I believe the work was being done in 1990-1991 and they decided the game would do a lot better on the new SNES then on the older 8 bit system. Great game and the SNES version improved on the original in several ways.

I'd kill to play that NES ROM, though.....

[Ed Oscuro]

...wonder if the monsters are the same as in the SNES version?

[rbudrick]

Great...now the price of NWCs are gonna quadruple. LOL :)

-ROb

[jajaja]

Great...now the price of NWCs are gonna quadruple. LOL :)

-ROb

Why? Sim City was on a own cartridge the way I understood it.

[Promophile]

Great...now the price of NWCs are gonna quadruple. LOL :)

-ROb

Why? Sim City was on a own cartridge the way I understood it.

because it got exposure in NP~ (the NWC was in the article also).

[TheRedEye]

This confirms my theory that Nintendo's offices are more or less Disneyland.

[jajaja]

Great...now the price of NWCs are gonna quadruple. LOL :)

-ROb

Why? Sim City was on a own cartridge the way I understood it.

because it got exposure in NP~ (the NWC was in the article also).

Ok, but do the NWC cart have anything to do with the Sim City cart? Arent they 2 seperate? If so, I dont see why the NWC cart would rise in value then. Its damn hight anyway hehe.

[dan2357]

I don't remember what I was watching, but they showed the offices. Then they showed there game storage room. They said any employee that works there can borrow any game inside, and had a guy working there like a video store clerk. How great would that job be, sit there playing any game you want and getting games for people when they wanted one.
I wonder if they can play sim city though?

[rbudrick]

This confirms my theory that Nintendo's offices are more or less Disneyland.

LOL I wonder if they still have that game libarary with every game for their systems for borrowing by the employees. If they do, I wonder if the older games are still in there...

-Rob

[Half Cab Leroy]

I just read that article a few minutes ago. Pretty cool that they mentioned the NWC cart too.

[Half Cab Leroy]

double post

[portnoyd]

I'm planning a raid to Vancouver, BC, Canada. I'll need a team of 10... no, maybe 11 guys to pull this one off. I need a Shigeru Miyamoto, a Sid Meier, two Tommy Talaricos, a Will Wright, and the biggest Dave Perry you've ever seen.

dave

[NESaholic]

Great info,i never heard of this,very interesting.
I wish i could get in to that game library.


I'm planning a raid to Vancouver, BC, Canada. I'll need a team of 10... no, maybe 11 guys to pull this one off. I need a Shigeru Miyamoto, a Sid Meier, two Tommy Talaricos, a Will Wright, and the biggest Dave Perry you've ever seen.

dave

Count me in! 8-)

[TheRedEye]

I'm planning a raid to Vancouver, BC, Canada. I'll need a team of 10... no, maybe 11 guys to pull this one off. I need a Shigeru Miyamoto, a Sid Meier, two Tommy Talaricos, a Will Wright, and the biggest Dave Perry you've ever seen.

dave

I once had this elaborate plan of moving to Vancover, finding their warehouse, and securing a job with the security company they use.

[tylerwillis]

Anyone with the issue and a scanner care to share?

[jwl]

I'm planning a raid to Vancouver, BC, Canada. I'll need a team of 10... no, maybe 11 guys to pull this one off. I need a Shigeru Miyamoto, a Sid Meier, two Tommy Talaricos, a Will Wright, and the biggest Dave Perry you've ever seen.

dave

Count me in too, I live near it and worked there for a day when I was 15, they said I was the yougest person to work for Nintendo ever, I'm thinking probably only at that office.

[leonk]

can anyone post a scan of the article?

[stuffedmonkey]

Man, just to pay off a guard so you could sneak in, dump the rom, and put the thing back in the case!

[lendelin]

To clear things up: yeah, NP described separately the SimCity prototype, and then the gold version of NWC Cartridge.

Interesting is that NP itself was (again) unclear about the number of NWC cartridges manufactured: "Only a small number were manufactured (for the NP sweepstakes and [!] for the event [Nintendo World Championship] itself)...but rumor has it that there are only 26 gold cartridges."

We know that 26 gold cartridges were sent out to the 26 NP Poll Contest winners; it looks like that they refered to the grey versions (which were also mentioned) when they mentioned "the event." In short: no new information under the sun.

...and, yeah, I'm sure that there are now more people aware of the NWC cartridge; in particular because it was mentioned that last year on ebay a gold version was bought for $2,200.

[CartCollector]

Well, it's nice that it's been found, but this also poses a problem. This is Nintendo. This basically means: no ROM. Ever. Unless there's another proto.
They COULD make it downloadable to the Rev, but that's unlikely. Even if they did, they'd probably jack up the price a lot, but that's no problem for SoulBlazer:

I'd kill to play that NES ROM, though.....

[Griking]

I'm planning a raid to Vancouver, BC, Canada. I'll need a team of 10... no, maybe 11 guys to pull this one off. I need a Shigeru Miyamoto, a Sid Meier, two Tommy Talaricos, a Will Wright, and the biggest Dave Perry you've ever seen.

dave

Sequel to Ocean's 11

Portnoyd's Posse

Gee, I wonder if since the Revolution will be able to play every game in Nintendo's library if Nintendo will make this game available to play.

[Dr. Morbis]

Well, it's nice that it's been found, but this also poses a problem. This is Nintendo. This basically means: no ROM. Ever. Unless there's another proto.
They COULD make it downloadable to the Rev, but that's unlikely. Even if they did, they'd probably jack up the price a lot
Nintendo cannot release the ROM without re-licensing the rights to do so. Ergo, the game/ROM will never be officially released. However, it could be anonymously "leaked" at any time. Doubtful, but you never know.

[Graham Mitchell]

Okay, guys, I haven't read everyone's post because I'm short on time, but would you believe I tested that game? I've had this conversation in a another thread but...

Here's the skinny. I was picked by Nintendo to come play unreleased games at something they called the Evaluation Center. They sent an invitation to Nintendo Power subscribers located in the Seattle area, hence I got invited.
We would play the games and rate them. SimCity for the NES was the only game I played that never got released.

At that time, the SNES had been out for a little less than a year, and I had had plenty of time to play the SNES version of SimCity and compare. This NES version stayed unreleased for a reason. It was inherently flawed. The "block sizes" of the commercial, industrial, and residential zones were only 2X2, instead of 3X3 like they were in every other version of the game. Meanwhile every other zone was the same size as the SNES version, including gifts. This meant that you couldn't make donut blocks, and the city planning was all screwed up as such.

On top of that it was really slow. Too slow. The NES probably had some trouble doing all the math necessary to keep that game running at a decent pace, and it couldn't keep up with the changes as you made them.

It looked good. It had good music. Dr. Wright was there, but I didn't see any monsters. It's entirely possible that the NES version didn't even have monsters because a few other things were also missing.

All in all, it looked like a neat package, but since the SNES version was already on the market (and was a far superior game in every respect) everybody playing it that day slammed it when it came time to rate it. That might be the reason it never got released, because we made it look like nobody in their right mind would buy it if they'd compared it to the SNES version.

[portnoyd]

You guys think Frank and I are kidding. A Campus Challenge 92 cart for everyone who helps pull the job off, and that's the bare minimum you'll get. I think that cart is safely an R11 - no one has it, and you'll get sued if you acknowledge that you have it because you stole it.

It has to be easier than robbing 3 casinos at once, but probably harder than robbing a 7-11. Not that I know anything about that sort of thing.

dave

[Jagasian]

I once had this elaborate plan of moving to Vancover, finding their warehouse, and securing a job with the security company they use.

So will the Lost Levels (http://www.lostlevels.org/) become militant, in order to obtain more rare unreleased prototypes? The biggest NES proto dumped so far has got to be Earthbound, which I might add, Lost Levels did a wonderful writeup on:
http://www.lostlevels.org/200407/200407-earthbound.shtml
BTW, WTFBBQ happened to the Lost Levels? It was a NES site that was worth reading and actually had content that you couldn't find anywhere else. I need more Lost Levels! Update with a new article for godsakes!

Anyway, why didn't the NP article mention Earthbound and StarFox 2? Those are extremely important prototypes. Sim City, on the other hand, would be on par with Earthbound and Star Fox 2, i.e. uber-protos. It is kind of sick that Nintendo would wave these in our faces, in this day and age when collectors would pay hundreds or thousands for such a proto. We either need some industrial espionage to get that Sim City for the NES dumped, or we need somebody on the inside, with a very kind heart, to put that frickin cart up on Ebay!

BTW, was there ever a Shadowrun 2 prototype for the SNES? In the end of the game, the credits say to be on the look out for the soon to be release "Shadowrun 2". I was under the impression that the developer was already working on it by the time the first installment hit the shelves.

[drivefast1690]

I dont have a scanner but a digital camera works just as well.....sorta, I had to kinda cut and paste part of it, but you get the idea

http://levade.homeip.net/gjd/simcitynes.jpg

[Jagasian]

Is it me or is that article teasing us, with the "if only...", and the "ROM is nestled comfortably" comments? BTW, can anybody identify the type of mapper the game looks like it is using? It would be interesting if it used an official Nintendo mapper that never saw the light of day, a one-of-a-kind mapper made just for Sim City. It would at least be worth a try to contact the guy who wrote the article and ask him to leak a dump of the ROM onto the net. Even instruct him how to do it in a completly anonymous way, such as an anonymous binary post to USENET, that cannot be tracked back to him in any way whatsoever.

Another idea. Messiah Ent. seems to be interested in re-releasing the NES. Why not go a step further and license games that were finished but never released, such as Sim City? People would buy because even at a run of a few thousand copies, it would still be extremely rare. With today's fabrication technology, they could probably just print little circuit boards with glop-top ROM/mappers. Licensing costs couldn't be much because Maxis and Nintendo could hardly believe that they could make any money out of the original Sim City, let alone an old unreleased NES port.

Back to the topic of contacting NP. Why not at least have them list all prototypes that they own copies of? Or better yet, somebody should intern at NP. The amount of protos that you would have access to would make it worth it.

[The-Bavis]

The pictures and article make this all very different. That is clearly a one-of-a-kind copy there in that hacked up Link casing. Also, sounds like it was just getting knocked around in some dude's desk. However, if there were consumer trials as was mentioned previously, there must be more out there than this single cart.

[rbudrick]

Okay, guys, I haven't read everyone's post because I'm short on time, but would you believe I tested that game? I've had this conversation in a another thread but...

Here's the skinny. I was picked by Nintendo to come play unreleased games at something they called the Evaluation Center. They sent an invitation to Nintendo Power subscribers located in the Seattle area, hence I got invited.
We would play the games and rate them. SimCity for the NES was the only game I played that never got released.

At that time, the SNES had been out for a little less than a year, and I had had plenty of time to play the SNES version of SimCity and compare. This NES version stayed unreleased for a reason. It was inherently flawed. The "block sizes" of the commercial, industrial, and residential zones were only 2X2, instead of 3X3 like they were in every other version of the game. Meanwhile every other zone was the same size as the SNES version, including gifts. This meant that you couldn't make donut blocks, and the city planning was all screwed up as such.

On top of that it was really slow. Too slow. The NES probably had some trouble doing all the math necessary to keep that game running at a decent pace, and it couldn't keep up with the changes as you made them.

It looked good. It had good music. Dr. Wright was there, but I didn't see any monsters. It's entirely possible that the NES version didn't even have monsters because a few other things were also missing.

All in all, it looked like a neat package, but since the SNES version was already on the market (and was a far superior game in every respect) everybody playing it that day slammed it when it came time to rate it. That might be the reason it never got released, because we made it look like nobody in their right mind would buy it if they'd compared it to the SNES version.

Great, so it's your goddamn fault we'll never see this game! Damn you!! LOL LOL LOL

Portnoyd, I'm in. I've tackled far more difficult missions before. BWA HA HA HA HA.

-Rob

[Gamemaster_ca_2003]

Finally This was one of the games I really hoped existed.

Now someone dump the thing so we all can play.

[TheRedEye]

Another idea. Messiah Ent. seems to be interested in re-releasing the NES. Why not go a step further and license games that were finished but never released, such as Sim City?

Because licensing Sim City from Maxis would cost approximately all the money in the world? I don't think you could make that much back by selling 300 copies, which is probably the extent of any kind of market the game would have. And that's being generous.

[Gamemaster_ca_2003]

Another idea. Messiah Ent. seems to be interested in re-releasing the NES. Why not go a step further and license games that were finished but never released, such as Sim City?

Because licensing Sim City from Maxis would cost approximately all the money in the world?

aggreed well since Maxis is owned by Electronic Arts and they demand all the money in the world for licencing.

[poopnes]

Another idea. Messiah Ent. seems to be interested in re-releasing the NES. Why not go a step further and license games that were finished but never released, such as Sim City?

Because licensing Sim City from Maxis would cost approximately all the money in the world?

aggreed well since Maxis is owned by Electronic Arts and they demand all the money in the world for licencing.

Nintendo isn't interested in releasing carts anyway, they're going to be focusing on the Rev's mysterious donwload service.

[joshnickerson]

[quote=TheRedEye]
Anyway, why didn't the NP article mention Earthbound and StarFox 2? Those are extremely important prototypes. Sim City, on the other hand, would be on par with Earthbound and Star Fox 2, i.e. uber-protos.

They've got to save something for the next installment. :D

[TheRedEye]

By the way, if anyone has this issue and an actual scanner, I need a high res scan of that screenshot. Here are the two I already have:

http://www.lostlevels.org/urnes/simcity01.jpg
http://www.lostlevels.org/urnes/simcity02.jpg

[SoulBlazer]

Boy, reading the article of the person who played the game and seeing the screenshots, I take back what I said eariler.

Bad timing (coming late in the life of the NES) and being compared to the SNES version are certinaly reasons for not being released.

But only having the city blocks 2 by 2 size instead of 3 by 3 with all other versions? What the HELL were they THINKING?

And if the game played slow on the NES.....another reason.

If the game had been released before the SNES version (by the summer of 1991) and had proper 3 by 3 blocks, it would have had good success.

Thanks for all the information and pics, guys!

[Graham Mitchell]

Boy, reading the article of the person who played the game and seeing the screenshots, I take back what I said eariler.

Bad timing (coming late in the life of the NES) and being compared to the SNES version are certinaly reasons for not being released.

But only having the city blocks 2 by 2 size instead of 3 by 3 with all other versions? What the HELL were they THINKING?

And if the game played slow on the NES.....another reason.

If the game had been released before the SNES version (by the summer of 1991) and had proper 3 by 3 blocks, it would have had good success.

Thanks for all the information and pics, guys!

Of all those flaws, the 2X2 blocks was the worst. Look, you can even see proof of it in those screenshots! @_@

Everybody's just itching to play this thing, but trust me guys. If you did, you'd be severely less than impressed.

[Jagasian]

Another idea. Messiah Ent. seems to be interested in re-releasing the NES. Why not go a step further and license games that were finished but never released, such as Sim City?

Because licensing Sim City from Maxis would cost approximately all the money in the world? I don't think you could make that much back by selling 300 copies, which is probably the extent of any kind of market the game would have. And that's being generous.

They have a Java applet port of the original Sim City available for free on their web site. Why would they charge lots of money for releasing the NES port? If they didn't license it for a real low amount, nobody would license it. Some money is better than no money, right?

They most likely made the regular zones 2-by-2, so that more zones could fit on the screen without scrolling, due to the NES's low resolution. I don't think it is that bad of an idea. Only newbies use the donut pattern. The best method is to stack zones. Of course, this also might not be possible in the NES version. Who knows. The only thing we know now is that the Sim City prototype is in fact a finished game, ala Earthbound Zero, and is now definitely the most sought after NES game.

[stuffedmonkey]

You guys think Frank and I are kidding. A Campus Challenge 92 cart for everyone who helps pull the job off, and that's the bare minimum you'll get. I think that cart is safely an R11 - no one has it, and you'll get sued if you acknowledge that you have it because you stole it.

It has to be easier than robbing 3 casinos at once, but probably harder than robbing a 7-11. Not that I know anything about that sort of thing.

dave

Heh. I hope you are kidding - since you would have to be a pretty lousy thief to discuss your master plan in a public forum.

The first rule of the fight club: don't talk about the fight club :evil:

[TheRedEye]

They have a Java applet port of the original Sim City available for free on their web site. Why would they charge lots of money for releasing the NES port?

Because we don't live in Magic Land, where candy rainbows shower golden documents that declare ideas public domain. If you wanted to program your own version of Sim City for the NES, and asked for permission to distribute the ROM for free, they might turn the other cheek. If fucking NINTENDO calls and says "Hay guys we want to put out a version of Sim City for the Nintendo that we don't have the license for lol is that cool?" then they're going to demand lots of money.

[portnoyd]

Heh. I hope you are kidding - since you would have to be a pretty lousy thief to discuss your master plan in a public forum.

You're not good at this, are you?

dave

[Darth Vader]

Heh. I hope you are kidding - since you would have to be a pretty lousy thief to discuss your master plan in a public forum.

You're not good at this, are you?

dave

Didn't you ever see Basic Instinct, stuffedmonkey? This plan is brilliant.

Danny

[TheRedEye]

My other idea was to set up a sort of community commune somewhere in Redmond, where like five of us live very cheaply and constantly plot our secret espionage.