Game Boy Development Cartridge With Pokémon Red Data Surfaces, Fetches $25,000 Bid
Auction house Goldin lists the item under a part number that has appeared on a 2000 development cartridge, despite describing the board as undocumented.
By Malik Salazar ·
A Nintendo Game Boy cartridge built for development work, carrying Pokémon Red data, is drawing bids at auction.
Goldin's listing shows one bid of $25,000 as of Oct. 23, the day the item surfaced publicly. PSA specialists authenticated the cartridge. They could not complete a full read of its contents, but retrieved the first 32KB, a result PSA called "technically unique." The data they did read matches the U.S. retail release exactly, and PSA said it expects the remaining portion to match as well.
The ROM header contains two discrepancies. One value at offset 0x014C, which stores the Mask ROM version, reads 55 instead of 00. That change propagates to the checksum at offset 0x014D, which reads CB rather than 20. Neither affects gameplay, according to PSA.
The cartridge shell carries a sticker marked DMB-MBC-16M-FLASH and the part number DMG-(F)KGDB-01. PSA reads DMB as Dot Matrix Game, the Game Boy's original internal name, and MBC as Memory Bank Controller, the chip that allowed games to exceed the console's 32KB ROM ceiling. The 16M points to 16 megabits of flash memory. Retro Dodo first flagged the listing and noted the shell runs longer than a standard Game Boy cartridge.
Goldin describes the board as "previously undocumented." The Rare Gaming Dump wiki lists the same DMG-(F)KGDB-01 number on a development cartridge from 2000 built around a 16-megabit Sharp flash chip. Photos in the Goldin listing show a near match to that board, though the wiki's example bears a sticker reading DMG-MBC3-16M-FLASH.
Pokémon Red launched in 1998 alongside Green and Blue. Red and Blue together have sold more than 31 million copies. The auction closes in several days.
A commenter on Retro Dodo's original report said a Nintendo Age user known as Pal rocks sold demo cartridges in 2015 that had come from a Nintendo employee who kept them out of the trash, and described this copy as a master copy that boots and plays normally. Those details come from the comment and are unverified.
