Collecting "truths" that just aren't true

[fcgamer | 4,753]

You know, like the BB exclusive rumors and stuff.

This one stands out to me, which is an example of why I hate jumping to conclusions about things.

A few years back and imagine circulated around from a magazine advert, which featured a Micro Genius 180 Famiclone. No one had ever seen this before but I figured it was just undiscovered like so many rarities.

Anyways, a website jumped to conclusions and stated that the machine was likely unreleased since it was red and white and resembled the Famicom, so the company was perhaps afraid to release it for fear of Nintendo. 

Then a fake "scholar" on this stuff quoted that site as a source, furthering the story.

I just sat back and watched the whole thing, rolled my eyes. I tried telling the first site that I thought their reasoning was flawed, then showed them a picture once I managed to find one of these machines, but it just landed on dead ears.

By now, I've found four of these machines, just since last autumn when no one had ever seen one before.

Let's share some stories about collecting "facts" that are just so bogus, yet no one is willing to acknowledge the truth.

 

[Tulpa | 3,534]

The big one I can think of is Stadium Events' rarity being due to a forced recall imposed on Bandai by Nintendo. While it is an explanation, no one has ever found any evidence that it actually happened. No documentation, no internal memos from either company, or even an ex-employee saying anything about it. But people keep repeating it as if it was conclusively proven to have happened. I get it, there's a mystique about that game, but show me the proof.

 

[Ankos | 463]

One odd behavior I've seen is when people look at unauthorized game stuff sold out in East and Southeast Asia and act like it was made to trick westerners, or act like it was sold in the West. In general selling that sort of stuff is a lot harder in the West, especially the USA. Hwang Shinwei allegedly had their career torpedoed due to legal action from Nintendo because they tried selling stuff in areas with stricter IP protection. I'm not saying none of it ever got sold in the West, but most of it was being sold elsewhere. I associate people acting like unauthorized translations and things of the sort being made to trick westerners with more with YouTubers than with serious collectors, but it still is misinformation that still circulates. A lot of these unauthorized games don't even look like their official counterparts due to brightly colored shells being commonplace for them. I know for a fact this stuff was not common in the West because I sort of collect this stuff, and looking for it in the USA is really ineffective. A bit more of it made its way to Europe and Canada, but tons of it made it to other parts of the World

[Sumez | 2,989]

there's no thread like a fcgamer thread

[RH | 4,965]

"The rare games for any system are the top 10 that are most expensive."

Ok.  That's now out of the way and hopefully it won't derail the rest of the conversations.

Edited February 14, 2023 by RH

[RH | 4,965]

1 hour ago, Tulpa said:

The big one I can think of is Stadium Events' rarity being due to a forced recall imposed on Bandai by Nintendo. While it is an explanation, no one has ever found any evidence that it actually happened. No documentation, no internal memos from either company, or even an ex-employee saying anything about it. But people keep repeating it as if it was conclusively proven to have happened. I get it, there's a mystique about that game, but show me the proof.

 

This is a good point, but this would be a follow-up question I'd have about SE.  Yes, there is a large mystique around this game, but do we factually have any information about this title and it's transition to Nintendo?  I mean, we can imply that Nintendo bought it from Bandai because there was a short period that Bandai sold it and then, poof, Nintendo started selling the game pad and SE rebranded as a Nintendo title, but other than seeing the results, are their any magazine articles or trade details explaining how this transition happened, or have we all 100% assumed what happened.

Again, it's obvious, Nintendo must have bought the game from Bandai because otherwise that would have been such a huge knock off, Bandai could have sued Nintendo, but do we have any documentation at all on the transition of this game, and what really happened?  I'm guessing probably not.

[DefaultGen | 5,428]

Can you find me a Myojo Charumera Famicom buddy  I'll call it rare. I'll do it!!

[Tyree_Cooper | 771]

hey that famiclone has my iq score printed on it

[Tulpa | 3,534]

1 hour ago, RH said:

This is a good point, but this would be a follow-up question I'd have about SE.  Yes, there is a large mystique around this game, but do we factually have any information about this title and it's transition to Nintendo?  I mean, we can imply that Nintendo bought it from Bandai because there was a short period that Bandai sold it and then, poof, Nintendo started selling the game pad and SE rebranded as a Nintendo title, but other than seeing the results, are their any magazine articles or trade details explaining how this transition happened, or have we all 100% assumed what happened.

Again, it's obvious, Nintendo must have bought the game from Bandai because otherwise that would have been such a huge knock off, Bandai could have sued Nintendo, but do we have any documentation at all on the transition of this game, and what really happened?  I'm guessing probably not.

No, we don't have any info on that, either, beyond what you stated and that companies have to respect IP property law, so whoever owned the copyright had to be compensated somehow. What the arrangement was between Nintendo and Bandai hasn't come to light.

However, this situation wasn't that unique. Atari Games developed the Temple of Doom NES game based on their arcade game, and then had some arrangement with Mindscape to release the licensed version, while Atari's Tengen label released the unlicensed one. Identical games. Admittedly, the Mindscape verison does acknowledge Tengen on the title screen. Similar to that, Namco developed the Famicom port of Pac-Man, arranged with Tengen to do a licensed and unlicensed NES version, and then released yet another version themselves later, with the game being identical except text on the title screens.

So there has been some game swapping among NES publishers. My guess, and I fully admit that it's a guess, is that since Bandai was the first third party NES publisher (though Capcom and Data East were hot on their heels), they had a close relationship with Nintendo in the early years of the NES, and handing the IP of Stadium Events and the FFF Pad to Nintendo for them to give it a go doesn't strike me as super unusual.

 

[phart010 | 1,708]

7 hours ago, Tulpa said:

No, we don't have any info on that, either, beyond what you stated and that companies have to respect IP property law, so whoever owned the copyright had to be compensated somehow. What the arrangement was between Nintendo and Bandai hasn't come to light.

However, this situation wasn't that unique. Atari Games developed the Temple of Doom NES game based on their arcade game, and then had some arrangement with Mindscape to release the licensed version, while Atari's Tengen label released the unlicensed one. Identical games. Admittedly, the Mindscape verison does acknowledge Tengen on the title screen. Similar to that, Namco developed the Famicom port of Pac-Man, arranged with Tengen to do a licensed and unlicensed NES version, and then released yet another version themselves later, with the game being identical except text on the title screens.

So there has been some game swapping among NES publishers. My guess, and I fully admit that it's a guess, is that since Bandai was the first third party NES publisher (though Capcom and Data East were hot on their heels), they had a close relationship with Nintendo in the early years of the NES, and handing the IP of Stadium Events and the FFF Pad to Nintendo for them to give it a go doesn't strike me as super unusual.

 

With each year that passes, this info becomes more difficult to discover. The details of the Stadium Events->World Class Track Meet  deal between Nintendo and Bandai are known to the people that made the agreement. These would have been Nintendo and Bandai employees around 1987. Since they were making negotiations, they were likely managers meaning they were probably 30+ years old. That was like 36~ish years ago, so they are likely at least 66 years old today.

With the way people are dropping like flies due to COVID related issues or whatever is going around or even natural death related to old age, if nobody tracks down and interviews these people to find out what went down soon enough, that info will be lost forever 

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

10 hours ago, Tulpa said:

The big one I can think of is Stadium Events' rarity being due to a forced recall imposed on Bandai by Nintendo. While it is an explanation, no one has ever found any evidence that it actually happened. No documentation, no internal memos from either company, or even an ex-employee saying anything about it. But people keep repeating it as if it was conclusively proven to have happened. I get it, there's a mystique about that game, but show me the proof.

I agree that this idea becoming "fact" in the public consciousness is wrong.  However, I don't think the leap to that conclusion is too farfetched, seeing as Howard Phillips himself confirmed a while back (perhaps on NA?) confirmed the minimum number of SE cartridges that had to exist (like 10K, IIRC) due to Nintendo's MOQ (minimum order quantity).  When you compare the number of SE cartridges seen/documented to the amount of Tengen Tetris cartridges which still exist after an actual, legally mandated, documented recall was performed, it's clear that something similar had to be afoot.  I want to say that either Howard Phillips or another Nintendo of America employee lent some credence to the idea via a thread on NA in its later years when their personal, sealed copy went up for sale, and they stated that it had come across their desk due to the title being recalled and all copies had been ordered to be destroyed so that Nintendo's would be the only one out there, and whoever had the sealed cart just hadn't gotten around to it.

I think part of the issue with situations like this is that we have so many "armchair historians" in the hobby that when tidbits like those I mentioned above come up, everybody kind of expects these folks to make a record of all these sorts of details, and then we as a community find out years later that that didn't happen.  If we as a community really want to know for certain how these things went down, someone will need to step up to actually document all of the little details, the sources for those, etc.  If we had a thread or subforum or something for things like this, I don't think it would be as necessary to have one or more specific people keeping all the receipts on stuff, as it would be available to everybody, but we've semi-recently talked about something similar on here and there's not been an overwhelming approval for it.

[Tulpa | 3,534]

34 minutes ago, darkchylde28 said:

I agree that this idea becoming "fact" in the public consciousness is wrong.  However, I don't think the leap to that conclusion is too farfetched,

I'm not saying that people can't speculate about it, but it has to be clear it's speculation. I just ask for concrete proof, not second or thirdhand rumors.

Added that not only have I not seen firsthand reports from NOA or Bandai (I haven't seen the Howard Philips conversations, but you'd think those would be recorded somewhere given SE's value), but no one who ever worked for a retail store where NES games were sold has ever mentioned having to pull Stadium Events from the shelves. You'd think there would be SOMETHING seen during the time it supposedly happened.

*shrug*

Edited February 14, 2023 by Tulpa

[phart010 | 1,708]

48 minutes ago, darkchylde28 said:

I agree that this idea becoming "fact" in the public consciousness is wrong.  However, I don't think the leap to that conclusion is too farfetched, seeing as Howard Phillips himself confirmed a while back (perhaps on NA?) confirmed the minimum number of SE cartridges that had to exist (like 10K, IIRC) due to Nintendo's MOQ (minimum order quantity). 

I agree with you that Nintendo very likely had a MOQ and 10k is probably a good estimate of what it would be set at. However, the existence of of MOQ doesn’t necessarily mean that the MOQ was always followed. For example, and this is the case with a lot of businesses, an MOQ could be established only after the business became viable. The idea that Nintendo has an MOQ doesn’t necessarily mean that they had an MOQ since day 1. 

With that being said, let’s just make the assumption for arguments sake that Nintendo didn’t have an MOQ back in 1987. NES sales were probably so good that all game titles were ordered in excess of the MOQ anyways. Stadium Events could have been a different story though because the game is useless without the Family Fun Fitness pad.

All of what I said is bs though. I think someone with the proper connections needs to just go out there and ask the right people. I’m sure someone out there actually knows what happened and nobody has ever bothered to ask them

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

50 minutes ago, Tulpa said:

I'm not saying that people can't speculate about it, but it has to be clear it's speculation. I just ask for concrete proof, not second or thirdhand rumors.

Added that not only have I not seen firsthand reports from NOA or Bandai (I haven't seen the Howard Philips conversations, but you'd think those would be recorded somewhere given SE's value), but no one who ever worked for a retail store where NES games were sold has ever mentioned having to pull Stadium Events from the shelves. You'd think there would be SOMETHING seen during the time it supposedly happened.

*shrug*

My thoughts on it was that it wasn't a true recall-recall, but more of a "soft" recall, where they had all the warehoused stock pulled back or made unavailable, and what was already out at retail was out there.  Hence you wouldn't hear stories from workers at Walmart or Hills or Ames or Kmart or Kaybee or Babbages talking about having to ship the stuff back, and only the warehouse workers for either Nintendo or perhaps some middleman distributors for Nintendo would really know what happened to all that stock that was sitting around.

You're absolutely right that we really need some sort of firsthand statement or concrete evidence of what happened there, but that would also require one or more people doing a lot of networking and digging to make contact with as many people as possible who worked for Nintendo or their associates during that time period to find facts, and the thing is, people just aren't doing it--and for the most part, not even the "historians," in the hobby.

26 minutes ago, phart010 said:

I agree with you that Nintendo very likely had a MOQ and 10k is probably a good estimate of what it would be set at. However, the existence of of MOQ doesn’t necessarily mean that the MOQ was always followed. For example, and this is the case with a lot of businesses, an MOQ could be established only after the business became viable. The idea that Nintendo has an MOQ doesn’t necessarily mean that they had an MOQ since day 1. 

With that being said, let’s just make the assumption for arguments sake that Nintendo didn’t have an MOQ back in 1987. NES sales were probably so good that all game titles were ordered in excess of the MOQ anyways. Stadium Events could have been a different story though because the game is useless without the Family Fun Fitness pad.

All of what I said is bs though. I think someone with the proper connections needs to just go out there and ask the right people. I’m sure someone out there actually knows what happened and nobody has ever bothered to ask them

I don't have the time or patience to go digging for it, but it was either stated by Howard Phillips in a thread on NA or someone on NA linked to an interview he did with someone who specifically asked about SE, and he outright said that there had to have been at least as many copies in existence as whatever Nintendo's MOQ was (I believe it was 10K), and he disputed the idea that Bandai could have gotten away with a partial order, etc.  Basically it cost too much to reset everything on the manufacturing lines if you were asking for less units than their minimum, so Nintendo wasn't willing to budge at that time.  He didn't know what became of all of the extra copies of the game that seemed to have disappeared from the public's hands (whether they were unsold and destroyed or repurposed for WCTM, sold out of the MOQ but everybody forgot about it, etc.) but was adamant about how Nintendo's manufacturing worked in those days, and the MOQ was the order of the day.

[phart010 | 1,708]

Speaking from personal experience, I have a few coworkers today that have been doing the same job in our company since the 80’s. They are on the verge of retirement, but they are still with our company. And they still know how to reach the people they worked with that have already retired (if they are still alive), because people had more friendly connections back then. 

If the same is true for Nintendo, it’s probably as simple as reaching out to one older person that’s still at Nintendo and asking him/her to ask a friend 
 

Edited February 15, 2023 by phart010

[twiztor | 855]

re: Howard Phillips / Stadium Events:

http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/18121761/the-true-story-nintendo-most-coveted-game

Quote

But what happened to the Stadium Events that had already been made? Nintendo and Bandai have declined to shed any light on the matter, leaving collectors to speculate. Rumor had it that the game had been sold at only one Woolworth's, which turned out to be false. Other collectors subscribe to the theory that Nintendo destroyed the remaining copies.

Not even Howard Phillips knows the truth. He was the face of Nintendo of America from the mid-'80s until 1990, testing and promoting NES games in Nintendo Power magazine. (A child of the '80s might remember him as the guru in a bow tie in the "Howard and Nestor" comic.) "There were 10,000 copies, maybe, produced," he says. "That sounds like a crazy- big number given that so few have shown up. Ten thousand copies for the North American release was close to minimum run. If there were 10,000, I don't know where they ended up. I don't have recollection of us burying them in a landfill. Destroying them or reworking them would've been a laborious task. Getting the label off would've been overly laborious on a per-unit basis. So ... the rarity is a mystery, isn't it?"

 

[RH | 4,965]

I can't speak for Nintendo and how they would have done business, but under certain circumstances, it's not impossible that Nintendo called up the companies that purchased SE stock and requested they destroy the merchandise, and offered a 100% full refund.

They would have hoped that these games that hadn't sold were destroyed and I'd guess that at most only a few Mom and Pop electronics shops might have taken the deal and sold the games anyway.  Regardless, I'm sure some certainly slipped through retail before they were "recalled".  It still makes me curious about the Atwood case.  How did all of those games end up there and abandoned, but I guess that type of thing happens more often than we'd expect.

[phart010 | 1,708]

2 hours ago, twiztor said:

re: Howard Phillips / Stadium Events:

http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/18121761/the-true-story-nintendo-most-coveted-game

 

I’m thinking Howard Philips was too high up the chain to know what happened. He was an top level executive and this would have been a mid tier manager level decision 

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

50 minutes ago, phart010 said:

I’m thinking Howard Philips was too high up the chain to know what happened. He was an top level executive and this would have been a mid tier manager level decision 

True, but he was able to state approximately how many units the MOQ was, and thus how many units would have existed.  That's something solid, at least.

[Tulpa | 3,534]

3 hours ago, RH said:

I can't speak for Nintendo and how they would have done business, but under certain circumstances, it's not impossible that Nintendo called up the companies that purchased SE stock and requested they destroy the merchandise, and offered a 100% full refund.

They would have hoped that these games that hadn't sold were destroyed and I'd guess that at most only a few Mom and Pop electronics shops might have taken the deal and sold the games anyway.  Regardless, I'm sure some certainly slipped through retail before they were "recalled".  It still makes me curious about the Atwood case.  How did all of those games end up there and abandoned, but I guess that type of thing happens more often than we'd expect.

But as I said, I would think more people would have witnessed this happening and would have provided that information to collectors. That is my issue with the recall theory. People stateside would be more likely to notice and remember. 

I think it had to be something that happened over in Japan that limited the number. 

[Tyree_Cooper | 771]

"The most coveted cartridge ever".

Also, your old Nintendostation could be worth thousands! And games were banned in China for many years! And Symphony of the Night Black Label is the rarest Castlevania game! And this game was a Japan exclusive, except that it wasn't, but I will ignore the Asian release because it shatters my beliefs and self-esteem! Etc etc

[fcgamer | 4,753]

3 hours ago, darkchylde28 said:

True, but he was able to state approximately how many units the MOQ was, and thus how many units would have existed.  That's something solid, at least.

He states 10000 was close to the minimal run and throws out a guess regarding what may have been produced. 

His response doesn't look or sound particularly confident to me.

[fcgamer | 4,753]

Likely SE situation is the same as the blue Chiller. Ready to go in limited quantities, some are sold, with Nintendo rolling their out quickly after.

No recall.

[Dr. Morbis | 2,091]

27 minutes ago, fcgamer said:

Likely SE situation is the same as the blue Chiller. Ready to go in limited quantities, some are sold, with Nintendo rolling their out quickly after.

No recall.

SE is 100% proven to have been manufactured for a retail release, blue Chiller hasn't.  End of story...

[fcgamer | 4,753]

19 minutes ago, Dr. Morbis said:

SE is 100% proven to have been manufactured for a retail release, blue Chiller hasn't.  End of story...

Where's the proof? Nothing that I've seen.

That's why the game is very similar to the Share Data Chiller. In an alternate universe, both would have been retail releases; as it stands though, both leaked out as they were ready to go, albeit in very limited quantities. Afterwards the rights changed hands, and the proper retail versions came out.