Prototype Pokémon Red Cartridge Hits Auction Block With $25,000 Opening Bid
PSA authenticated the Game Boy development board, reading only its first 32KB of data before hitting an unreadable section.
By Sofia Molina ·
A prototype Pokémon Red cartridge for the Game Boy surfaced at auction this week with a single $25,000 bid on the table. The listing went live on Goldin's platform, and Retro Dodo first flagged the item as "incredibly rare." The cartridge dates to the game's 1998 release.
Specialists at PSA authenticated the board but could not complete a full data read. They recovered the first 32KB of contents, which PSA called "technically unique." Beyond that section, PSA reported the game data as "completely identical" to the U.S. retail version and said it expected the unreadable remainder to match as well. PSA's report does note two differences in the ROM header data, neither of which changes gameplay: offset 0x014C, which records Mask ROM version, reads 55 instead of 00, and the dependent checksum at offset 0x014D reads CB rather than 20.
The cartridge shell carries a sticker marked DMB-MBC-16M-FLASH and the part number DMG-(F)KGDB-01. PSA reads DMB as likely referring to Dot Matrix Game, the Game Boy's original internal codename, and MBC as Memory Bank Controller, the chip that let games exceed the system's 32KB ROM limit; the 16M would indicate 16 megabits of flash-writable memory. Retro Dodo noted the cart runs longer than a standard Game Boy cartridge. Goldin's auction calls the board a "previously undocumented" development board, though the Rare Gaming Dump wiki lists the same DMG-(F)KGDB-01 part number for a development cartridge from 2000, which used a 16-megabit Sharp flash chip labeled U1 FLASH MEMORY and bore a slightly different sticker reading DMG-MBC3-16M-FLASH. Close-up images in the Goldin listing show a near-identical design.
Pokémon Red launched in 1998 alongside Green and Blue, releases that helped start the franchise in the 1990s. Red and Blue together are reported to have sold more than 31 million copies.
A commenter on the original report offered context on how such cartridges reach collectors, saying a Nintendo Age user, Pal rocks, sold a batch of demo carts in 2015 that had come from a Nintendo employee who kept them instead of destroying them. The same commenter said this copy appears to be a master copy that powers on and plays normally. Those claims come from a reader comment and have not been verified.
Several days remain before the auction closes, and the current $25,000 bidder may yet take the piece.
Source: Tom's Hardware
