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Cifaldi said that while eBay saved searches are one of many tools he employs to find rare games, he actually knew Battlefields of Napoleon<\/em> would be coming up for sale. In fact, he’s had the game in his hands.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
\u201cOne of the services I provide is authentication of prototype items,\u201d he told The Verge<\/em> via Zoom. \u201cIf you actually look at that auction, there’s an authentication write-up by me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
He said the owner was a former developer who worked on the game and held onto it for decades before deciding to put it up for auction. For the Power Glove game, it’s not a developer putting it on the block but the wife of the game’s designer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n <\/noscript><\/span><\/div>\nOne of the games is an unreleased demo for the ill-fated Power Glove<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n
\u201cThe designer, in this case, worked for a company called Novak,\u201d he said. \u201cThey weren’t game developers, but they worked with Mattel directly on Power Glove products and did the on-paper design that was then sent to Rare to turn into a video game.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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The Power Glove game is a one-level demo that Cifaldi suspects the designer took to trade shows to see if it could generate enough interest from retailers to make it worth finishing. Obviously, that didn’t happen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Cifaldi is not sharing how much he’s raised on behalf of the VGHF to win the auction, but he expects them to be expensive. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cEach one of these is a snowflake,\u201d he said. \u201cThere has never been an unreleased Power Glove game available before. So is there someone who is just the world’s biggest Power Glove fan who finally has a second game to play? Is that person going to drop a hundred grand? I don’t know.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cThere has never been an unreleased Power Glove game available before.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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He’s expecting the auction to go from anywhere from $5,000 up to $10,000 and hopes the pledges and donations continue so he can be well positioned to win the auction. \u201cThe response has been really positive so far. And I’m really happy that people seem to be compelled by these things,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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It’s important for the Video Game History Foundation to obtain these unreleased games and demos and others like them because it’s working against the clock. A lot of the conversation surrounding video game preservation centers taking a live game and storing it digitally in case its publishers decide to stop selling it or take it down from digital storefronts. (See additionally: Stadia, Google.) But there are often just as many cases where a cartridge kept sealed and stored is still subject to physical degradation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n <\/noscript><\/span><\/div>\nThe infamous Atari Landfill <\/figcaption>Photo by Jason from The Wasteland, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n
\u201cRetail games, like stuff that you actually bought in a box, you shouldn’t worry about for a really, really long time because the chips that contained the data were pressed,\u201d Cifaldi said. \u201cThose are meant to last a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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But for these games specifically, the way they were made wasn’t with longevity in mind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cThe stuff we’re talking about here, these sort of prototypes, those are very different chips. Those are rewritable chips,\u201d he said. \u201cThese prototype games on rewritable media could start degrading any day.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cAnd that’s actually what happens,\u201d Cifaldi continued. \u201cThey don’t just suddenly switch off. There’s a term called bit rot, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. The actual bits in the chip start like rotting slowly and changing themselves over time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Though these games are extremely old, Cifaldi says he’s not too worried about their contents being damaged as he’s more concerned about potentially losing out on the auction to the world’s biggest Power Glove fan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cIt’s always risky blasting this kind of thing out to the public because you risk alerting people who might want to bet against you and purchase these for their own private collections and perhaps not allow anyone to access the game data,\u201d he said. (The Verge<\/em> has not included the link to the eBay sale specifically for this reason.) Cifaldi understands and empathizes with collectors even when their goals are at odds with preservationists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
\u201cThe second that I that I put data off of a cartridge on the internet that for an unreleased game, that item is no longer worth as much money because it’s no longer one of a kind,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are basically destroying them as collectibles in order to save them as games.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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If he doesn’t win, he does have a plan. \u201cI just try to keep tabs on where everything is and hope and assume that an opportunity will arise eventually where I can preserve the thing,\u201d he said. That’s something that’s happened before. But if he does win, he has plans to make the games accessible to the public in some way, and he hopes to get in contact with the developers who worked on them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cThe hope whenever we get one of these is that we not just preserve the game data \u2014 we want to preserve its story,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n