There was a recent auction for an airball prototype that had been a blockbuster rental. At the time I thought that it was odd. 

http://nintendoage.com/forum/mess...

Now a second prototype popped as a rental.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Double-Dr...

Maybe it is more common than I thought it was. Does anyone know of any other examples?

Maaaaaan, I didn't think it was possible. I guess anybody can fuck up royally now and then.

the dude in his auction said he found the double dragon proto in a pawn shop... presumably here in oregon.

this game appears to have been rented out from a video store in Beaverton OR... the address on the game 9248 SW Beaverton Hillsdale Hwy. I have no idea on the history, but some weird ass protos have been found in the region if not more often than not -

Ninja Crusaders - American Sammy (goodwill Beaverton, sold to me and passed on the Matt & Mark Nolan at PRGE in 2012)
Vice Project Doom w/ marketing mock-up box - American Sammy (goodwill Beaverton, sold to me at PRGE in 2012)
Blockout - California Games? - (found at Goodwill Bins in Hillsboro Oregon) - purchased PRGE 2013 Steve Linn
Double Dragon 2 - Acclaim - eBay by way of Pawn shop in Oregon, supposedly rented from Command Performance Video in Beaverton - purchased by myself May 2017.
Kitty's Catch - ? - from Philomath/Corvallis Oregon - purchased by Matt & mark Nolan circa 2010?
Impossible Mission II - from Corvallis Oregon area - purchased by ihavethepma, resold somewhere?

I'm sure i'm missing some from Oregon, but those are ones I know 100% have originated from the wild in Oregon to collectors hands.

a few things?
HAL Laboratories was located in Beaverton and had very close ties with Nintendo - maybe they had a cache of development stuff from other manufacturers and when they closed employees took them?
Maybe a marketing person for Nintendo lived in Oregon and they ended up every where known to man.

Who knows? NOA isn't that far from Oregon and people move around a lot.

The whole rental thing though is really odd, especially on the airball.

Knowing that info Qix, I may move to Oregon.

I know of some rental shops back in the day that would purchase used games and then put what they didn't have out for rental and resale the rest. Maybe that is how some protos ended up being rented out. If someone brought in some of their games to sell and happened to have a proto in the mix then it makes sense why one could end up a rental. I think someone on here purchased a Xexyz prototype from a Blockbuster years back.

I had a prototype Xexyz that came from a Blockbuster video clearance sale. It was *not* a former rental. This was when Blockbuster tried to get into Gamestop's business and added "Game Rush" to most stores, then decided not to do it and the put all the used games on clearance.

Following your first link, the auction says a guy "bought out a Blockbuster store." That was probably just Gamerush merchandise, not a former rental.

Who knows about the other one...

I googled a story that says the Game Rush days started in 2004.  You had to be way ahead of the game to know what you were getting back then.

I'm pretty sure the Airball was a rental. It had the prototype artwork cut out to fit a rental shell with the "Please be kind rewind" sticker on the back.
 

How are you seeing pictures? The eBay listing doesn't show me any.
 

I remember, because I followed and bid on that auction.
 

Oops, that dude probably should have put "prototype" somewhere in the title. Congrats on being alert Qix lol.

So my Ninja Gaiden pre-censor proto came from Oregon, as well. I got it from a guy who was used as a kid tester back in the day. Funny it was the pre-censor  

 

If it truly were rented out, that would have been awesome.  Could you imagine if one of the folks that rented the game then began collecting games twenty years later, and kept claiming to others how he had rented and played that game back in the day, with everyone else arguing against it, calling bullshit, and saying that the game was unreleased.

 

Or your game had bad words? It really is crazy if you think about it.

Hahaha, in the Final Fight 3 Famicom game, there is the quote, "Those bastards slaughtered my family."  To see something like that in a licensed game, it would have been amazing.
 

Makes sense as Oregon is close to Washington.

Do you know if it was this one:
http://www.nintendoplayer.com/pro...
 

The proto I found was just in a random lot of games off of a Portland Craigslist ad, but from what I remember it didn't have any type of rental stickers or markings. Definitely unique though, as I've never seen a clear case like that before. I sold Impossible Mission here to Martin/nesworld for a whopping $90.

^yes and i believe it was the SEI version in a similar case, but clear.

this is what jeffs looked like as well. didn't know there were two with clear shells

http://nintendoage.com/forum/mess...

A somewhat similar situation happened between me & a friend of mine back in the day. He worked at a blockbuster and told me they had California Raisins at his store. For years I called him a liar or that at the very least he must have been confused. He swore up & down that he was not crazy & even gave me details about the games box art. Years later I came to realize he was telling the truth. I felt bad about it & apologized to him. We both still bring it up every time we catch up.
 

Does that mean that there may be two copies? The only one I knew about was the one that the guy got murdered over.
http://jacksonville.com/tu-online...
 

^the fuck?

that's a crazy story.

maybe some of this stuff did end up in rentals as test market? generally, i know, Nintendo wasn't a big fan of mom and pop rental stores and that many unlicensed companies targeted this market.

Did they murder the guy just for the NES games, or for that game in particular?!?!!

The rental stickers were sometimes used on non-rentals as security to keep people from claiming that the wrong game was in the shell after a board swap and exchange attempt. Also, mom & pop rental stores that accepted trade-ins would sometimes add a game they don't have to their rental library. Some even commingled their used games for sale with their rental games where any rental was also available for purchase. Even Blockbuster did that for a while, though they didn't source their rental inventory from trade-ins. Heck, I've seen a public arcade that operated a similar way (any machine set up for public pay-to-play also had a price posted on the corner), so any mom-and-pop operation could have received a prototype, slapped on a rental sticker, and put it up for rent.

Now, are we sure it's a rental sticker? All those by-mail trade-in services slapped on similar foil stickers for security but they usually just had their name and number: "Game Time 1-800-555-GAME" or "Play It Again" or whatever. Rental shops that also deal in used games would do it to their used non-rental inventory for the same reason. Just like they would use the "Please Rewind" security stickers on rentals, they would use rental security stickers on non-rental used inventory.

Though it's easy enough to see how a prototype could end up in a mom and pop rental store's inventory, it's also not hard to see how one could end up looking like a rental that wasn't.