I had no idea any of these existed until about 10 days ago, but I managed to get my hands on a first-party Dragon Warrior prototype! I don't know the exact build date, as the tape covering the windows doesn't have it, but I believe it's from some time in early-mid 1989 (the game was released August 1989) and the first-party individual it was obtained from originally did indicate it was an earlier build. I haven't had the game dumped yet, but given the presumed build time I would be surprised if there aren't some coding differences. I fired it up today and nothing stood out in the first 5-10 minutes or so, but it's obviously a massive game. Here are some pics, with a standard DW board for comparison purposes. As you can see, there's a green jumper wire on the proto board, which is kinda cool. The save battery still works, too!

Ooooh....

I want it soooooooooooo bad. Definitely a nice item. Congrats. I own a copyNES if you need help dumping it.
 

The 8914 on the mapper gives you at least an earliest date, thats 14th week of 1989 so early April. Could have been any time later, but not sooner.

Oh, nice catch, thanks! My best guess is somewhere around April-May-June. Is there a standard timeframe when review copies were sent for review? A month before release? Two?

That's really fucking cool, I'm curious if there are any gameplay differences, DW1 is the shit.

I would be shocked if Dragon Warrior was sent out anywhere for review. Video game magazines were only just starting to come back at the time, and Nintendo was notorious for not sending them early copies so that Nintendo Power could have the exclusives.

Really awesome proto! Be on the lookout for different enemy names and attack/spell names.

very nice!

Being made by enix doesn't this make it a 3rd party prototype?

Sick find! Still waiting for the right prototype.

I could be wrong, but I believe Qix's DW proto is a review copy. Actually, I think it may have been from a game tester. This copy is from development. I can't tell the date from his pics, maybe I will shoot him a PM.
 

I always considered first party to mean straight from the developer, not necessarily Nintendo. If I am wrong, I will fix it.

 

Also be on the lookout for higher EXP for defeating enemies. My copy gives you like 64EXP just for the defeating slimes and lo level enemies.

Dude, that's awesome. Did you beat it? I mean, how long could it take with crazy payouts like that. You go up four levels after your first battle, haha!

 

Haha, that's sweet. I played through about 5 minutes, including a few slime battles, and didn't notice anything right off the bat. The exp system seemed normal at that point. I will probably dump it before I put much more time into it, just in case.

 

Dragon Warrior was published by Nintendo of America, it is a first-party game. This cartridge came from Nintendo, not Enix (Enix didn't even have a U.S. presence yet).

This might be obvious to say, but the DW prototype is using a production SAROM board. The reason why it is capable of using EPROMs as-is is because Nintendo didn't rewire ROMs 512Kbit or smaller in size. The green wire on the CHR ROM is probably for some odd quirk with that EPROM (like its upper unused address lines need to be set to VCC, etc).

Very cool prototype though.

Just because Nintendo published it doesn't make it a first party title, does it? Surely Final Fantasy and Faxanadu are 3rd party titles, but were published by Nintendo for the NES.

 

Labeling prototypes based on where the code originated strikes me as an odd, especially considering that about half of Nintendo's output even in Japan was made by external contract developers.

I'd base it on the publisher, which is the entity that controlled and conceivably even created (burned) the physical prototype. Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy and Faxanadu's English localizations were produced by Nintendo of America, and the games were published by them as well, calling them third party just because the core game was developed outside of Nintendo's offices is flawed. By that logic, Super Mario Bros. is a third-party game, since the code was farmed out.
 

Wouldn't they be 2nd party? 
 

I get what you're saying, but I think it would fall onto the IP owner's, not who developed it. If that were the case, Dragon Quest 8 is a Level 5 game. Just because a company outsources development, that doesn't mean they don't dictate what goes on in their games (after all, it's their game and IP).

That would be the equivalent of saying Bloomsbury Publishing owns Harry Potter because they published the work of JK Rowling. (Maybe not the best analogy, but similar enough for a publishing standpoint).

 

Sort of? But do we really want to start micro-labeling like that? It still feels like a weird distinction to make to me, I can't wrap my head around not calling a Nintendo-produced product that came out of Nintendo's office a first-party game.

2nd party would be when the 1st party owns majority of the, in this case, developer company. Nintendo published all of Rare's NES and SNES games, and were basically owned by Nintendo, but were 2nd party titles.

 

Gotcha. I really wasn't certain.