After a $16,000 auction, a canceled Konami NES game is feared lost forever

A long-lost Konami game called Battle Choice just made its public debut 35 years after it was quietly canceled, but after a $16,000 auction many fear that the game might now be lost forever.

Battle Choice was in development at Konami around 1988 for the Famicom, the Japanese version of the NES. It was a hybrid of shogi (a Japanese game similar to chess) and fighting game. Basically, you'd play it as a board game up until the point where one piece was supposed to capture another, and then you'd play out the fight in real-time action to see which piece wins.

The concept was pretty similar to one of the very first Electronic Arts games, Archon: The Light and the Dark, but the gimmick here is that you'd be able to choose fighters from throughout history, including modern soldiers, fantasy knights, mechs, and apparently even high school girls. Until this month, the only reason anyone knew of the existence of Battle Choice was because of a 2015 Konami soundtrack album that offered a few tracks from the game and a mention in the liner notes, as detailed by Unseen64.

That's why it was quite a shock when a prototype cartridge for Battle Choice suddenly appeared on a Yahoo! Japan auction, complete with a few images of the game up and running. This marks the first time anyone who wasn't working at Konami in the late '80s has ever even seen a screenshot of the game.

That auction closed over this past weekend for ¥2,401,000, which translates to just under $16,000. We don't know who the high bidder is, but we do know that the runner-up was Video Game History Foundation director Frank Cifaldi. Cifaldi held a private fundraising drive to acquire and preserve the game, but wasn't able to beat the deep pockets of the mystery bidder.

Unfortunately, it seems likely that if the high bidder wasn't working with the VGHF - one of the most prominent game preservation bodies out there - it's more likely that a private collector now has the game. While some collectors of unreleased games work closely with historians to make sure the content of these cartridges is preserved so that everyone can have access to it, others have developed a reputation for hoarding away their treasures, refusing to allow ROMs to be copied from the original cartridge for fear that it will diminish the value of the physical item. Many observers are assuming that's the likely fate of Battle Choice.

Game preservation is already a tricky topic, but the secret answer is that most commercially released games have already been preserved thanks to piracy. If Battle Choice ends up languishing in a collector's house, it won't even get that inauspicious chance at life, which is a shame for something that seems like a genuinely fascinating historical curiosity.

Who knows, maybe Battle Choice would've been a contender among the best NES games of all time.