An acquaintance of mine on Facebook said someone offered these to him for sale, and the seller claims he found them in Mexico:








They appear to be retail boards with stickers on them. All the carts use the same exact fonts, and "Nintendo" is stamped on the stickers on every board even though the games come from different companies.

Thoughts?

Edit: Added Mega Man X.

I am no expert but the typo on there too is glaring.

I have seen several protos with mispelling on the labels before and such, but yea I know what you mean. Usually it's the game name or company that is mispelled.

super fake and not because of the typos.

I've owned protoypes in the past that legitimately spelled Nintendo wrong.
 

Only one way to find out i guess

100% fake af

Run

Ya, seems really suspect. I am 100% no expert but a few red flags..

The PCB seems wrong, are they re-wired underneath?
The front labels look...wrong..

It really looks more like what someone figured a proto would look like then tried to replicate it / added some "wearing" to make it seem authentic..

the plastic on the nes carts looks lower grade.

They just don't look right.

Eh, I wouldn't immediately say fake.

I've had chips labeled with stickers that look similar on retail games:
http://nintendoage.com/forum/mess...

If this were in a random, poorly listed lot on Ebay, I would personally have pulled the trigger and rolled the dice. Without the carts in hand, I don't feel comfortable saying real or fake.

The labels in person would be pretty easy to use to determine authenticity if the games were in hand.

Saw them Facebook, I'm no expert but besides the obvious typos and home printed labels/stickers I found it hard to believe both Zelda and Joe & Mac having the same style of stickers despite release dates are about 5 years apart and by different companies, also Zelda CRC chip and MMC1 are dated past release date and uses a 3 screw cart when originally the game is 5 screw (3 screw carts showed up in 1988?), doesn't make much sense to me Nintendo making a demo/display cart for an already released game. I'd consider these fake unless there's strong evidence suggesting these are real.

Don’t forget man. We have confirmation there was only one Zelda proto. I agree you can’t just dismiss because we’ve seen some crazy authentic stuff. But, in this case we know direct from Nintendo they only had one proto for Zelda and that ain’t it. If one is a known fake I wouldn’t touch the rest. 

 

The dates are all over the place, the labels look like shit, and they're from some random dude in Mexico.  I'm with you that there is basically zero doubt that they're fake.

There can always be other non-retail but non-proto weird Zelda stuff, and stuff in that era is just so all over the place.  I've seen genuine dev/sample/non-retail PCBs and chips that date well after launch, and there are devs out there that absolutely insist that an unreleased game they worked on was indeed released commercially even when faced with obvious evidence that it wasn't.

Even the Zelda proto guy who originally brought it into the collector community thought it was just a regular Zelda test cart and ended up trading it for some pretty cheap Neo Geo stuff I think.  People have poor memories and devs had terribly inconsistent practices.

At the end of the day and on topic though, yeah, I'm absolutely comfortable saying these pretty much have to be fake.

 

Interesting to me is that the Katakana (Japanese) shown there written on the cart says スターフォックス (Star Fox)