Just when I thought my days of finding awesome things in the wild were turning into a distant memory, and my collecting games was becoming a bit discouraging my spirits are renewed and I find a prototype in the wild just sitting in a random local store amongst a bunch of random nintendo games for the low price of $7. At first glance I almost passed it up thinking it was merely just a game someone had torn the label off of and just slapped a plain sticker with the name of the game on it, but then I did a double take and asked myself why in the world would it have a date and some fancy initials, I then immediately realized it had huge potential of being a prototype. As soon as I got home I opened it up and saw the eprom with the little capcom sticker and was super excited about the find.  I have already fired it up and it works great, the date on the cart is 5/25/89 and the game was released in September of 89' which leads me to believe this is more than likely a final version of the game right befor it went into production, plus it's on a normal size board, but none the less it's still an awesome find and a pretty cool looking proto. Here are the pics:

 

awesome

That is awesome! Protos in the wild always amaze me. Congrats

Outstanding!

Sweet dude! That must have been a hell of a feeling.

Congrats on the pick-up, and don't forget me if you ever decide to part with it

Great find! One of my all time favorites. You should play through it and see if there are any differences just in case.

Well you are in the home state of Nintendo...

Definitely going to play through it, as it is one of my all time favorites as well. One of the few games I owned as a kid.

Very cool find. Not only is it a proto but a Capcom Proto and a good game to boot. Let us know why you notice when playing through. Congrats sir!

Gloryhole

SSS EEE SSS Y Y
SS E SS Y Y
SS EE SS YY
SSS EEE SSS YY

Awesome find man! One of my favorite games as a kid.

Wow, that's killer man, I have never found anything close to that cool in the wild, amazing!

Congrats fellow Washingtonian! Finds like this keep me looking, especially when I head to the west side of the state.

This is an amazing find, great game too !

Awesome find !

Nice! Dump the ROM just in case, too!

Nice find! Board itself says its UN-EPROM, so I don't think is a regular board!

I live about 15 mins from the BC/Washington border and have meant to spend a weekend in Washington just hunting for games (as someone posted above, it's the home state of N).

Really nice find

I noticed this too, it's definetly a different board than the regular release board, I opened up a normal Duck Tales and checked. Also the board is a bit bigger, or maybe shaped different than a standard board as they had to grind down some of the plastic in the cart case so that it would fit properly. I plan on doing a full run through of the game sometime this weekend to see if I can find any differences from the regular release. 

if it's anything like the one we dumped years and years ago it has some neat differences, mostly in the text. The Moon music is slower, too.

SAWEEEEEET! What an awesome find dude! That's really kick ass to find the prototype version of such a cool game.

Do you remember any specifics on the text differences so I can keep an eye out for those while i'm playing through? I'll also see if I notice any difference with the Moon music, is it fairly noticeable?

Yeah, the moon music is very noticeable, it's slower. The text differences are also super obvious: the entire script is different (much more engrish-y) and the text box itself is a different size. Download the ROM, it's out there!

I know I am late to the party, sick find dude. I'm tingly just thinking about it.