Earthbound 64 Prototype Cartridges

Whoever owns the cartridges knows the demand is there, so there's surely nothing we could do.

I just found this site and am somewhat dismayed seeing this post. OP makes a baseless claim that there are four cartridges, and then "Nintendo confirmed this to be true"?

I've stuck around the prototype scene long enough to know there's never been mention of some four cartridges known to exist. Where did this come from? And Nintendo confirming that some protos of theirs are out there in some guys collection? Yeah, I don't think so...

For what it's worth, someone with the name coreycorey or something to that effect had I believe three blue 64DD dev disks that he thought may have contained the game but turned out not to. And supposedly some guy on Youtube says he owned another disk version that he sold for $35,000? This is info from a basic Google search.

So where does this idea of four cartridges come from?

I'm actually fairly interested that someone brought this topic up.

I don't want to put a damper on the thread, but I'm sure everyone in the collecting "know" is aware of how desired Earthbound 64 is, so there are a couple of things to consider.

Pretend someone did actually have it. There's a chance they'd either:

-Stay out of the spotlight and continue to keep private ownership of the game (similar to the 24K GBAs)

-Let it be known that they have such a game (meaning we'd already know of the existence of it)

-Dump it (also meaning we'd already have it)

So I'll just make a huge assumption and say that it's likely no one has found one yet. So since this is "lost" and we're effectively looking for it, I have no idea how you'd successfully go about finding it if no one in the collecting community has it. I suppose you'd have to befriend the community and go through their channels and connections trying to hunt down every blue N64DD disk in existence.

Or I guess a case of SegaSonic Bros. could happen and someone could find it in a dumpster. But I think time is also against us because I've heard the blue disks can easily get their data removed, and they were also rewriteable so there's also a chance it doesn't even exist anymore.

I wouldn't put too much stock into random claims about disks either. I'm pretty sure most of those disks don't have anything on them anyway, or at least that's what I've heard. And obviously as an info source you'd need a reputable person or some kind of visual proof that it existed on the disk.

Still though, I'd be down for an attempt at uncovering this.

Even if there's no prototype cartridges, there's still SOME kind of existence out there. Ign has footage of gameplay and it looks fairly finished. So there's gotta be something.