When Blockbuster Video started getting rid of all their old console games for $1 or $0.50 or something (BOGO, IIRC), I bought hundreds of NES and Genesis games. I always knew something was weird about my copy of Xexyz and suspected that it could be a prototype, but I never even bothered to remove the shrink-wrap, labels, and price tag BBV put on it...
...until today. I think that was over 10 years ago! I know I found the receipts a few weeks ago but I think I threw them out without looking at the dates.
Anyway, all those years I was skeptical of it being a proto for the same reason: The photocopied label. It looked like a photocopy of full-color retail/final label art, which would usually require a time machine to have on a prototype, so I assumed that it was a rental or something with a damaged label that someome tried to restore, especially since most protos have handwriting or no label. Did I mention that it was missing the left third of the label art? It's missing. It looked like a perfectly straight cut leaving only "XEX" and part of the "Y." You could see old dried adhesive where the rest of the label once was, though I assumed it was more likely from the original retail label since I was still skeptical of it being a prototype. I thought the extra weight was from the wrap and labels BBV had stuck all over it over the years (multiple layers!). I now realize that the label was like that because the individual stickers on the label paper they used were smaller than the game pak's label area. They likely printed beyond the individual labels on the label sheet and used a guillotine to cut the backing off with pieces of multiple label stickers together. They applied them together as a full label, though they did it upside-down.
The left side eventually peeled off when the adhesive degraded.
I began to suspect it was a proto anyway several years ago and wanted to check but I was living out of state and I had it in storage with the rest of the collection. I came back a few years ago and dug it out but I didn't want to check or even remove the BBV shrink-wrap until I was ready to record my effort. I didn't find the time and motivation until today. I am actually somewhat disappointed to see that mine is not the only one known to exist but, hey, congrats to you too, man.
Mine had the same label on the back but I didn't notice because it was under a "This (Nintendo) Game Pak Belongs To:" sticker with a picture of Mario which the previous owner had slapped on over the MicroDen label without even filling it out. It was bigger than the MicroDen Corporation label but smaller than the gray "Do not clean with alcohol, benzene, thinner or such solvents" label that was supposed to be sticking out the sides. When I noticed that the gray label was missing I looked closer and saw that there was another even smaller label underneath, which turned out to be the MicroDen label. My MicroDen label had an additional address and phone number hand-written in the blank space around the MicroDen information: Bill Scott, 220 Emily Dr, Lilburn, GA 30247 and a local 404-925-8899 (local). It seems that MicroDen was a graphic design business and I believe they were involved in making the artwork. I wonder if this other guy was a game reviewer or something who they passed the prototype on to.
When I took it apart I immediately noticed the large PCB with an unpopulated hole for an SRAM battery. Flipping it over, I immediately noticed the EPROMs with stickers covering the UV erasure windows with handwriting on it ("Xexyz CHR" and "Xexyz PRG"). Inspecting closer, I saw NES SKEPROM-01 on the PCB, which the Bootlord DB has associated with many other protos:
http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/se...
I played it a bit to see if there were any obvious differences. There is no debug menu or version number or anything suspicious, but I did encounter glitches from the very start. I do not know if these glitches were fixed in the final version. For example, the ghost did not appear first time I entered the second door with the treasure chests. I had to exit and re-enter. It started over and it did it again the next time (ghost appeared when I left and re-entered). When I entered the third door for the first weapon (Ball-something), I got the message saying that I received it but when I left I still had my normal weapon. I would receive the Ball weapon after entering a second time. This also happened more than once. Now, I was using an NES Advantage joystick with turbo functions turned on so I may have triggered a glitch by pressing buttons really fast in an effort to hurry up and test things, but I've actually seen people recommend a turbo controller for this game. The were no graphical glitches so I did not try cleaning the game or testing more thoroughly.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36716461/Xexyz%20Proto.jpg
The attached image is much lower resolution than the one linked above.
