GameGavel has been on a roll lately with auctions for rare games like
Red Sea Crossing and
Air Raid CIB in the last month. Now the
Super Nintendo Campus Challenge we wrote about several months ago is
for sale on the site as well.
Bidding is up to $5,200.
The seller explained how this game was only found recently:
"In the early -90's a Swedish company approached both Nintendo and Sega about creating a game system for TV broadcasting. The TV viewers would call in and then play games on live TV broadcast shows using their telephone dial key (DTMF) tones. The company where I worked was in turn approached by this company and we were asked to build this interface system from scratch.
We designed a system that interfaced two phone lines and two consoles. Two consoles for each system, either for two callers and two consoles simultaneously seen in the TV broadcast in a split screen fashion. Or just having the second console for "lining up" and pausing the next game in the place you wanted the next player to start inside a game. In addition to making the dial tones "press" keys in the game we had to make up separate "key maps" where one single phone key could translate to different console key presses depending on what was best in each game. For some games one single phone key would translate to jump+forward and in another game it could be something else.
The project rolled on nicely, they had game shows running regularly on both small and larger TV satellite channels in Sweden and also on Swedish national TV for a while on some big Saturday night show. We also went to Philly in the US where I helped set up a system for what I think was some morning show. We built a handful of these systems but after a while we were not in the loop anymore on what countries they were used in. I remember talks about Italy and... hmmm.. memory eludes me. Some other countries anyway. After a while I totally lost contact with the company who had the initial idea and who managed the project
During the development we had a large number of games to test different phone-to-console key maps. We also had a bunch of consoles both for testing, development and delivery to TV stations. When work on the project trickled down we were left with some games and some consoles to be able to service any system we had built. The few items that were left in the end were eventually packed up and stored in my attic for twenty years."
That's two really rare games found in attics during the last month. I need to stop writing this article and go check my attic......
