So, clearly this game exists since someone posted gameplay footage on youtube. Will this ever be dumped? Is the owner on this site? Id put $5-700 towards a dump of it....anyone else? think the owner would dump the rom if they were paid enough?

I won't say who owns it, since I don't know if they want people to know or not...but I saw gameplay footage of this at Campout last year, and it's a hilarious game! Throwing a number like $700 out like that might get the person's attention though, that's for sure.

$5-700 is a big stretch.

You might want to contact the owner of the youtube vid.

Huh. I did not know this.

A collective pool of money might work, need to find the owner first

I have an idea of the owner (or former) because he mentioned it in an old post on retrogaming roundtable, but I wont mention it here just in case...

DreamTR is the owner, and he's gone on record a number of times stating that this is one of the few titles that is off the table as far as rom dumps go. Things may have changed since the last time he discussed it, but that has been his stance for some time now.

So in other words, we all might as well consider this game lost still. Thats a damn shame too, Id put a hefty penny towards getting this dumped, or even if he did a limited repro run, they ALL would sell (unlike the racing game he released for genesis, I mean....its a racing game, and Im pretty sure exists on other platforms)....Socks is damned legendary! Everybody and their Uncle would want a copy!

It's not lost. I'm sure it was preserved and maybe one day it'll see the light of day.

As I got to watch it being played live, I think it's a neat game, and hopefully one day it'll get released.

This is why I wouldn't even consider releasing boxed copies of anything nowadays...Very few people bought Indy Heat and it doesn't matter if it is a "racing" title or not, people seem to be drawn to repros regardless of how bad they can be. Unfortunately a good game like Indy Heat that Rare/Tradewest did for Genesis is very good and people just shrugged it off but we aren't talking about that....


I'm not reproducing Socks. It's not lost. It's been dumped and saved so it's not going anywhere in terms of losing "data."

It's very hard to find games not released on other platforms in unreleased format and unfortunately there is the "what have you done for me lately" mentality a lot of people have when it comes to games like this. Because of this I'd rather sell the game outright then deal with the outbreak of emails and angry requests people have for a game that they believe they "deserve" of all things.

So to take that in consideration, I am not against selling the game to the highest bidder and they can do what they want with the game and I don't have to worry about angry You Tube people  = )

Honestly, that YouTube video did what it intended to do. Purposely grainy to "troll" people into some sort of funny hysteria so we could see the comments....it's nowhere near as good as the Bio Force Ape troll, but it's still pretty funny.

So yes, if someone wants to offer me money for the thing to purchase it, be my guest, but I'll let loose a few things so I don't get bombarded with questions:

This is unreleased on all formats.
This is the only copy.
I have no released to the dump to anyone.
The game is complete 100%
The game is kind of fun.
It's rarer than an NWC
It's rarer than a gold NWC.
It's pretty damned hard to find if there is only ONE copy.
It's the same rarity as my 4 month old.

Meaning there is no specific price value or "range" on something like this but it wouldn't be cheap but I'll definitely listen to offers if people want the thing....I can definitely say that I've seen RELEASED N64 protos (not even sold by me) go for some serious coin. Money that approaches near ludicrous pricing....and these things are getting tougher to find, but again, offers are welcome. Just know that if I don't respond it's probably because it was WAYYYYY too low.

 = )

Realistically speaking, it's not a stretch to say that a private dumping of a prototype is still lost. In the public community, the ROM would never be lost, it'd be copied too many times for that to happen. Hard drives can break and EPROMs don't last forever.

I'm sure someone who collects rare prototypes has more then 1 backup and takes the necessary steps to preserve the ROM.

Dream is all about history of video games, he's not one to let a piece of history die on some random hard drive.

Cool, so buy the game and release it for free to everyone then? I'm more than willing to sell it to someone so they can do that.

Fuck man, really?

If you want to dictate what does/doesn't happen to a prototype, ESPECIALLY one that can be readily purchased at any given time if you're willing to spend the cash, buy it.

People can do whatever the fuck they want with what they own, and beyond that, it isn't even remotely "lost" in any stretch of the word.  People who own protos that they've spent TENS of thousands of dollars on (Dream, us, others), you back them up in many, many places.  It's just what we do.

Well that's nice to hear. Too many people don't do adequate back ups, even for important documents... Okay yeah it's a bit demeaning to assume proto collectors are morons, but you guys don't have to take such an offensive tone with my comment. You just never know with some people...

Geez you guys are touchy...

Honestly, less so than you'd think.  For every one of these comments that we actually react to, there are 100 we ignore.  Eventually, we do respond, and it's usually with the frustrated tone of "shit, haven't we covered this a million times before?"

What it really boils down to is even if we were "morons" in the regard to proto preservation, it would be irrelevant.  Whatever we do with our belongings is our prerogative and no one else'.

Me and Matt, we like to back them up, release as many as we can for free, and make reproductions of others.  Dream has released a ton of free stuff over the years, done some community dumps, and done some reproduction runs.

The biggest thing that we have in common is that we:

-  Paid large sums of money for these items
-  Worked harder than most to obtain these items
-  Don't like being explicitly told by people we've never met, or maybe even had an online conversation with, about what is "best" for them

I love being able to give back to the community in the form of free ROM releases, and I'll continue to do so.  There are so many fans of the system and the games and I really like sharing in the excitement of experiencing a lost piece of NES history.  If I later change my mind and find that rubbing my nuts on each proto I own makes me equally as happy, so be it.  It's my item that I spent my money on. 

If people told me what I was doing with them wasn't what they wanted me to do, I'd tell them to lick my nuts.  Unfortunately, that would mean removing my nuts from the protos so that they could lick them, and that just seems counter intuitive, but you get the idea.

Alright I understand, sorry for being a dick...

You weren't man, seriously, no worries.  I just don't want you to think it was your one comment that made anyone respond in the manner they did.  It's years of hearing similar things that every once in a while catch up with you and rub you a bit funny.

We're all on the same team.  We like seeing this stuff get preserved and we love the history behind these things.  Individuals have different methods of preservation (releasing ROMs, recording videos, screen caps, stories from the dev team, just cataloging them, etc.), but for the most part we all have the same idea.

Sorry for being too blunt, that was pretty shitty.  It's members like you, the ones that really have strong feeling about protos, that I really like to get ROMs too.  Which reminds me, I should release some more stuff soon...

I've backed up a lot of my important stuff but I lost count of my cart protos when I went over 1,000 so it's impossible to document my stuff.

No one is being "touchy" it's just a lot easier to tell someone what they "should" be doing with their stuff and they aren't doing it themselves.

If you want you can buy Socks and archive all these protos. That's what I am getting at. You won't do it or you will have an excuse as to why you can't. It's very easy to say that stuff to someone because it sounds like I am being a dick but the initial tone is you making a blanket statement about other people's property.

I mean like I said, open invite to doing so, and open invite to selling the game. Everyone is quick to yell about the game should be dumped but here I am saying to buy the cart from me and do what you want and all I hear are crickets.....it's just too many people who don't collect protos but want to play ROMS trying to tell someone else what to do.

Side note, which one do you have - SNES or Sega?

i wouldnt even dare post critisizing what Dream and the Nolans (and drx too but thats for another forum) do with they're protos, if you guys looked at how much (could've been lost) unreleased and beta stuff, they have released FOR FREE you would see how much of an asset these guys are to the community

Well I didn't mean to criticize, all I wanted to do was add a different perspective on the discussion. I realize it's really easy to tell others what to do, so I apologize for offending.

kcsims: I have the SNES version

soz Guntz wasn't aim at you personally, just seen a few threads where people give these guys grief for not releasing (insert proto name here) for free when they have released so much!

Yeah you should see the You Tube comments...WHEREZ MA STUFF ? BURN ME DA ROMZ....seriously, it's amateur hour with everyone expecting people to just hand over stuff...