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. 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. It 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 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, suspicious about the authenticity of the cart, pointed out the labels as proof of its possibly dubious origin. First, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the cart's seeming recipient, was well known for not playing a single video game in his life . Secondly, 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 a 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; additionally, 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 and in the U.S., 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 it 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 before going 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 a for $125 to a longtime game collector 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. Mariotti refused to disclose any information about Brooks to Neo Demiforce after the group contacted him about the cart’s whereabouts, during which Neo Demiforce's owner at the time, a teenage Steve Demeter, behaved antagonistically towards Mariotti about Mariotti's refusal to give them Brook's email address; however, the group was tipped off by a Mother fan named "EBounding" about Kenny Brooks’ email and ownership of the cart after Brooks and EBounding had already discussed the cart over a newsgroup. After asking 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. 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 on April 27th, 1998.

In later versions, several minor alterations to the ROM's code were made to bypass the game's copyright lock-out screens after previously altering a single byte of code (which triggered the screens at various points in the game) to play the ROM on the emulator it was dumped onto originally, NESticle (since NESticle contained a bug that prevented the Earth Bound ROM from playing on it ) with the title screen being graphically modified to display the name "EarthBound Zero" to both differentiate the ROM from its unmodified version (which was released along with EarthBound Zero) and from Mother's already-released english-translated 1995 sequel, EarthBound. Later versions fixed the various grammatical typos from NOA's official translation, 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 in 2000 to 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 the best condition he can (even using a blow dryer to carefully remove the cart's labels to 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, but is not entirely opposed to the idea 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 dumped along with the modified EarthBound Zero version in 1998 had gone missing since then.

Gallery

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  The most circulated image of the TK-69 cart, which is directly from its eBay listing in 2000

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  The inside of the TK-69 cartridge

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

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  A shot of the cart from Mother to Earth

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  Another shot of the cart from Mother to Earth

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  The crew of Mother to Earth with the TK-69 cart