Monster Party Prototype Released!

Remember when we announced that a rare Monster Party Famicom prototype was up for sale on eBay? Well it ended up selling for £2,050.00 (or $3516.18), well outside of the price range of most collectors, but lo and behold! Now you can have it free! Mark Nolan, one of the two Super Nolan Bros., released the ROM earlier today. He is well known for his larger-than-life presence in the collecting community, breaking into the spotlight with the auction of his $55,000 Zelda Prototype. As an early 4th of July present to us all, he's released the Monster Party prototype rom for download! This prototype is notable for the many differences the early version had compared to the final commercially released product. Bosses were different, there was blood, even the title screen was different. Now you can enjoy the whole thing yourself. I wonder if this will have any effect on price of the regular Monster Party?

Monster Party Famicom Prototype on eBay

I know it doesn't look like much but this is one of two known prototypes for the Famicom version of Monster Party, known in Japan as Parody World: Monster Party. Your initial thought might be that there's no real point on buying a prototype of a released game but things get interesting when you consider that the Japanese Famicom version has significant differences and it was never commercially released in Japan, just in the United States.

This is actually a rather large point of contention in the prototype scene because the owner of the first known prototype (he paid around $6,000 for it) swore on his life that he would never dump the data on the cart. He would rather take it to his grave. A little crazy, I know. Well, this second cart has been uncovered in a box of crappy Kusoge games and now it is up for sale on eBay. This is an interesting auction and you can check out lots of photos of it here.