An unreleased Punch-Out prototype just revealed four scrapped fighters

The Video Game History Foundation has acquired and analyzed a pre-release prototype of the 1987 NES game Punch-Out. The cartridge contains scrapped fighters and unused artwork. The non-profit organization documented the board's contents this week. The dump gives players a look at the game before it became a global phenomenon.

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out is easily in my top five best NES games of all time. I had the cartridge when it was brand new. I played it non-stop, and the pattern-based boxing mechanics never got boring. Seeing an early build of something so familiar is jarring.

Pizza Pasta and Mongol Khan

The prototype contains massive differences from the retail release. The most notable changes are the opponents. The early build includes Pizza Pasta and Piston Hurricane. Both of these fighters originally appeared in Nintendo's arcade boxing games but were cut from the final NES roster. Pizza Pasta was a formidable late-game opponent in the original 1984 arcade cabinet, and Piston Hurricane also appeared in the original 1984 Punch-Out!! arcade game.

The code also contains data for two entirely new fighters named Rockyhead and Mongol Khan. Nintendo either scrapped these characters completely or heavily reworked them into the opponents we actually got. The transition from the dual-screen arcade hardware to the limited NES console required major compromises. The developers had to shrink the player character down to the diminutive Little Mac just so players could see over his head to read the opponent's telegraphs.

Real ROM chips and Glass Joe

The physical cartridge itself is an anomaly. Development boards typically use erasable EPROMs with little UV windows so programmers can flash new builds over and over. This specific board uses real, non-rewriteable ROM chips. Someone at Nintendo had to permanently burn this specific build of the game onto silicon. This suggests the cartridge was a major milestone build or a near-final review copy rather than a daily work-in-progress board.

The prototype also has early character portraits. I absolutely love the early Glass Joe artwork. It has a rougher, more expressive style than the polished pixel art that shipped in the final retail version. The French boxer looks even more battered and pathetic than usual.

Before the heavyweight champion

Nintendo originally released Punch-Out in arcades in 1984. When the company brought the game to the NES in October 1987, they needed a marketing hook. They secured the likeness of professional boxer Mike Tyson, who was dominating the heavyweight division at the time. The resulting game became a massive commercial success and defined the console for a generation of players. This newly discovered prototype gives us a snapshot of the game right before that crucial branding deal took place.

The Video Game History Foundation does the hard work of tracking down and archiving these lost pieces of gaming media. Not all heroes wear capes. Some of them just dump old Nintendo cartridges so the rest of us can see what could have been.