Hello everybody! I am starting a new series that will be about videogame related obscurities, rare items, my collection, technical information and various other fun content. I have been reverse-engineering videogames for a very long time and have discovered a whole slew of interesting, unused and various strange and amusing surprises!

Let the fun begin with the first entree of an extremely rare copy of Super Mario Bros. for the NES.. no, the Famicom? Wait! [music slowing down to a screeching hault] it's not either of those!

You may or not know about the Famicom Box. It was a kiosk allowing timed per-pay sessions of popular Nintendo games in Japan found mostly in hotel rooms of customers.

The box had a selectable set of cartridges that the use would press a button to select that game. The cartridges, however were unique and not reminiscent of standard Famicom cartridges and appeared closer to western NES Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges.

Famicom Box cartridges were black as opposed to their grey western counterpart and had a generic Mario label that was based on the NES Test Cart labels. Mario is shown and it looks quite nice actually, simply depciting the name of the game in Japanese. Not a shiny gold cartridge like Zelda 1 and 2 had but it definitely holds up aesthetically. The internal board is actually an NES cartridge PCB with one small but important difference. The CIC 10NES chip is nowhere to be found and so it will leave your NES blinking unless you physically disable the chip, which I don't recommend for console purity's sake.

Super Mario Bros was not revised and is identical to the NTSC standalone world release.

There is a Sharp variation of the Famicom Box called the Famicom Station and the cartridges are grey instead of black. No actual PCB differences are known but assumed they have no 10NES CIC communication chip as well and will not function on an NES.