After a $16,000 auction, a canceled Konami NES game is feared lost forever

gamesradar.com:

A long-lost Konami game called Battle Choice just made its public debut 35 years after it was quietly canceled, but after a $16,000 auction many fear that the game might now be lost forever.

Battle Choice was in development at Konami around 1988 for the Famicom, the Japanese version of the NES. It was a hybrid of shogi (a Japanese game similar to chess) and fighting game. Basically, you'd play it as a board game up until the point where one piece was supposed to capture another, and then you'd play out the fight in real-time action to see which piece wins.

The concept was pretty similar to one of the very first Electronic Arts games, Archon: The Light and the Dark, but the gimmick here is that you'd be able to choose fighters from throughout history, including modern soldiers, fantasy knights, mechs, and apparently even high school girls. Until this month, the only reason anyone knew of the existence of Battle Choice was because of a 2015 Konami soundtrack album that offered a few tracks from the game and a mention in the liner notes, as detailed by Unseen64.

That's why it was quite a shock when a prototype cartridge for Battle Choice suddenly appeared on a Yahoo! Japan auction, complete with a few images of the game up and running. This marks the first time anyone who wasn't working at Konami in the late '80s has ever even seen a screenshot of the game.

That auction closed over this past weekend for ¥2,401,000, which translates to just under $16,000. We don't know who the high bidder is, but we do know that the runner-up was Video Game History Foundation director Frank Cifaldi. Cifaldi held a private fundraising drive to acquire and preserve the game, but wasn't able to beat the deep pockets of the mystery bidder.

Unfor