A Pre-Tyson Punch-Out Prototype Turned Up In A Garage, Sold For $45,000, Then Someone Set It Free
- Lee Murray
- Apr 15, 2026
- 3 min read
This is the find every collector plays out in their head. A lost NES cartridge, turning up decades on, still holding secrets. And the best part of this one is not the money it fetched, but what the buyer did next.
Earlier this year an early prototype of Punch-Out!! for the NES surfaced, reportedly from a garage sale held by a former Nintendo of America employee. What makes it special is the title screen: it reads simply "Punch-Out!!", because this build predates the 1987 deal that put Mike Tyson's face on the box. This is the game before it became Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, a glimpse of the road not taken.
The cartridge was graded, then sold through Heritage Auctions for $45,000, roughly £35,000, to an anonymous buyer. And here is the bit I love. Rather than seal it away in a display case, that buyer allowed the ROM to be dumped and released so preservationists could pull it apart for free. The changes have since been catalogued in detail over on The Cutting Room Floor. That is the physical-media ethos at its best: the object is preserved, and the knowledge is shared with everyone.
Ghosts in the machine
Poke around inside and you find the game working out what it wanted to be. Soda Popinski is in there under his original arcade name, Vodka Drunkenski, later changed for the retail release. Piston Hurricane and Pizza Pasta appear too, holdovers from the 1984 arcade Punch-Out!!; Piston Hurricane went on to become Piston Honda, while poor Pizza Pasta was cut entirely.
Strangest of all are two fighters nobody can place: "Rockyhead" and "Mongol Khan", who have no known counterpart in the finished game. Historians genuinely cannot say whether they became someone else or were simply dropped. As a playable thing the build is threadbare, just four opponents in order, Glass Joe, Bald Bull, King Hippo and Don Flamenco, before it loops back to the start.
Why the experts are stumped
The cartridge itself is an oddity. It uses mask ROMs, where prototypes normally use EPROMs, has no sound code at all, and carries an intact lock-out chip and an early Nintendo of America house-style label. Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation, a man who has handled NES prototypes for more than 25 years, said flatly: "I've never seen anything like this."
You can read the full breakdown at Time Extension, and the documented list of every change lives on The Cutting Room Floor.
The final game shipped in 1987, of course, and later got reissued as Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream once the Tyson licence lapsed. But this scruffy, silent, half-finished cartridge is the one I find myself thinking about. Forty years in a box, and now it belongs to all of us. That is exactly how it should be.
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