A never-before-released Famicom disc game was recently discovered in Japan, which has the retro gaming community excited as it may be a missing piece of the puzzle in Nintendo history!
The discovery comes from Junkya.Hassy, a retro game collector and console restoration expert. He recently received two FDS disks that were intended to be discarded from a recycling company in Kyoto. After reading them, he found that extremely rare development materials were hidden inside! include:
- The beta version of “Eggerland” under development by HAL Laboratory (may be a bug-fixed version)
- A completely unknown game——《Maze Ver. T2.0》
What is the origin of this undisclosed game?
Junkya.Hassy shared the game screen of “Maze Ver. T2.0” on Twitter/X, which shows a character standing in a maze at a 45-degree angle, surrounded by stairs. The overall style is quite unique.
It is still not possible to confirm the real author of this game, nor is it clear whether it is an officially developed work. After all, Famicom disks are rewritable, and this may just be a test toy of a certain developer. However, based on the origin of the disk, the game likely came from HAL Laboratory or someone who once worked at Nintendo, which has many game historians and nostalgic gamers paying close attention!
So what’s in the other one? What’s this HAL thing?
I just analyzed the blue MAZE for everyone, but what about the other white disk? The content of this disk is an internal beta version specially used for bug correction when “Eggerland” was developed by HAL Laboratory in 1987!
“Actually, at that time, I vaguely thought that this white disk might be rare, but I didn’t expect that the value of the blue disk would be even more amazing…!”
This means that he not only found an undisclosed game (MAZE), but also found a special development disk that may have come from within HAL. This was a major breakthrough for the historical research of the Famicom disk system.
Could this be the lost Nintendo game?
This discovery has once again attracted the attention of the game archeology community, especially in the era of Famicom Disk System. Since disks can be rewritable, many prototype development works, unreleased games or internal beta versions may still be hidden in undiscovered disks. If this “Maze Ver. T2.0” is really related to HAL or Nintendo, then it will become a major discovery in the history of gaming!