TK-69 cartridge

The TK-69 cartridge

The TK-69 cartridge is the most well-known copy of the existing Earth Bound prototype cartridges, which contains a complete english translation of the first Mother game, which was completed by Nintendo of America and its respective localization team in September 1990. The cart is a standard gray-colored, three-screw NES cart, with the main labels being placed on the back of the cart. The cart is also particularly famous for being the first Earth Bound cart to be found on the internet, and also the first to be publicly dumped online in 1998 by the hacker group Neo Demiforce under the alias "EarthBound Zero". It is also the final cart of the translation to have been manufactured by Nintendo of America, presumably in 1994. The cart has since been sold and is now in the hands of game collector Andrew DeRouin.

The cart's labels are prominent for their featured copyright dates: one date reads Feb. 21st, 1994; while the other reads March 15th, 1994. The other labels on the cart specify that that specific cart was to be sent to a "Mr. Yamauchi" for evaluation after being sent to "Hiro Yamada". In the past, many fans, suspect about the authenticity of the cart, pointed out the labels as proof of its possibly dubious origin; Hiroshi Yamauchi, who the cart seemed to imply was the intended recipient of the cart, was well-known for not playing a single video game in his life , and the date was claimed to be unfounded, as there had been no recorded event of any sort of Earth Bound copy circulating in 1994, let alone the reason for the cartridge being sent for evaluation that year. In a Lost Levels interview with the head of the localization, Phil Sandhop, he stated that multiple Yamauchis worked at Nintendo during that time, including a specific Yamauchi located in Canada that year; the acronym seen near Mr. Yamauchi's name reads NOCL, which is an abbreviation of Nintendo of Canada Limited, and not a mispronunciation of NCL (Nintendo's headquarters in Japan). Phil Sandhop also went on to speculate that after the game's initial rejection by NOA’s executives, the cartridge was manufactured and sent to Canada in 1994 to be evaluated as a possible release in that region, but was denied since producing a bilingual english-french manual would be too expensive to return on the investment.

While it is currently unknown how the cart managed to leave Nintendo's official headquarters, the cart ended up at a now-defunct game shop named FamCom games, which sold primarily Japanese Famicom titles and North American NES titles. Game collector Greg Mariotti (and future film producer) later picked up the cartridge at the store, receiving the game for free from the store's owner; he went on to create a save file and play the game himself, placing the game on his shelf along with his other NES game titles afterwards. Later, he sold the cart (along with other NES titles in order to purchase a house) on eBay for $125 to a buyer named "Kenny Brooks" in 1998. This caught the attention of the popular hacker group Neo Demiforce, who had initially considered fully translating and dumping the Japanese Mother version onto the internet themselves before finding the already-translated TK-69 cart online. After Mariotti refused to disclose any information about Brooks to Neo Demiforce after the group contacted him about the cart’s whereabouts, the group was tipped off by a Mother fan about Kenny Brooks’ ownership of the cart. After enquiring Kenny Brooks about the possibility of obtaining the cart from him to dump online, the group entered into a series of negotiations for temporarily leasing the cartridge to the group, which Neo Demiforce's owner at the time, Steve Demeter, later stated to be . Kenny Brooks ended up loaning the cartridge to Neo Demiforce for $400, which was obtained through funding from the EarthBound fan community, which was ultimately dumped onto the internet by Neo Demiforce under the name "EarthBound Zero" (meant to distinguish the ROM from the already-released english-translated 1995 sequel, EarthBound) on April 27th, 1998, in which a "Zero" was graphically placed underneath the game's "Earth Bound" title screen. In later versions, several minor alterations to the ROM's code were made to bypass the game's copyright screen after previously altering a single bite of code (which triggered the screens at various points in the game) to play the ROM on the emulator it was dumped onto originally, with the title screen's "Zero" also gaining a ice blue tinge to it in later versions.

After gaining back the cart from Neo Demiforce, the cart was then sold by Kenny Brooks online for $1000 dollars, which was purchased by a buyer named Andrew DeRouin. After the cart remained in his older brother's possession for a number of years, the cartridge was eventually given to DeRouin to keep, where it has remained in his sole possession ever since. He has treated the cartridge as a collector's item, taking great care to keep the cartridge in as best a condition as he can (even using a blow dryer to carefully remove the cart's labels took take pictures of the cart's internal circuitry and carefully placing them back on at one point). He currently has no plans on selling the cartridge for profit or gain, but is not entirely opposed to the idea of selling it should a good offer come along. He was most prominently featured in the 2019 documentary Mother to Earth, in which he discussed his ownership of the TK-69 cart and his history with it. In 2020, the TK-69 cart was dumped online once again, as the original, unaltered ROM used for its initial 1998 dump had gone missing since then.

Gallery

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  The most circulated image of the TK-69 cart, which is directly from its original 1998 eBay listing

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  The inside of the TK-69 cart

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  Andrew Derouin holding the case-protected cart from the Mother to Earth documentary