https://lostmediawiki.com/Ōkōchi_Gengorō_Ikka_(lost_build_of_unreleased_Nintendo_64_simulation_game;_late_1990s)

I happened to see there is an entry for this game on the Lost Media Wiki some days ago, as a featured articles no less, which seems to have sparked some talk and some further mentions on it on some Youtube channels related to lost media. After believing for the longest time I was the only one to ever know or be interested in such a title, I figured I could chip in here with some more informations on it that I had worked on collecting a while back.

Some years ago I got from Amazon the book "Maboroshi no Mihatsubai Game wo Oe!" ("Search for the Elusive Unreleased Games!"), a book devoted to Japanese videogames that never got released or fell into development limbo. Admittedly, I purchased it for completely different purposes, in that I noticed it featured a lengthy interview with one of the developers of Densen, another unreleased PS2 game of which so far there existed only one enigmatic demo trailer. However, the one that eventually caught my curiosity the most was in fact the entry for this certain N64 game.

With some time in my hands, some time back I worked on translating the entry for this game as found on the book.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hTYgMa7VR7DkuSxa7z5Vg2qaDNSFtj1CzaazqYU7HjI/

In addition to that, this is also a translation by me of the original blog entry from the owner (Game Tantei-dan) dating back to 2007:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qt2ciTzHqW8zuCOUTMCUcUHqmrUzg5YAJ9pOaefA7Ek/

As far as I could research on it, there never existed any news on it on any videogame magazines at the time.

As a side note, more backtracking on the route taken by this cartridge reveals that it was spotted all the way back in 2005 on the Japanese Yahoo Auctions (although the listing wasn't archived, unfortunately). A thread on the AssemblerGames forums showed some interest in it, first misidentifying it as a mahjong game before someone came to point out part of the on-screen story.

https://assemblergames.org/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=3291&sid=f25b129e1349b7b90b87fce1a8b8aacd

On the DigitalPress forum, around the same period, there has also been an unsuccessful attempt at pooling money to purchase the cart (with the objective of dumping the ROM), which went nowhere.

https://forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?51135-Ohcouchi-Gengorou-Ikka-UNRELEASED-for-N64-Community-Dump

Now, on to the status of the game: contrary to what is written in the LostMedia Wiki entry, this is not so much "lost" per se. The cartridge is (still) in the possession of one Osaka-based game store called Game Tantei-dan, but (as I have also put in a disclaimer inside) a tweet from a customer visiting the place in 2017 attests that the game had at least in the past been put out to be freely played by the public, in what was some open "bar area" of their establishment.

https://archive.is/ues3U

Knowing how jealously kept these prototype games are by Japanese collectors, anyhow, I can't help wondering what it would have been if the cartridge had ended up being purchased by Western collectors instead.