Unboxing: Kirby’s Adventure

If you are one of those folks who like to collect factory-sealed items and keep them sealed then you are going to want to avert your eyes on this one. To-each-his-own, of course, but this is a particular obsession that I do not share. I collect games to play them and also to admire them as a complete piece including the manual, inserts as well as the packaging and the physical media; this requires opening the box.

But What If Something’s Missing?

Mind you, I have no problem with second-hand CiB copies but the thing that always irks me about buying an open box is a little nagging voice asking if everything that is supposed to be there really is there. This is not an issue of mistrust; I can assume the good faith of the seller. It’s simply that if you are not the original owner then how are you sure nothing was lost or removed along the way? Even for original owners, how can you be sure about something you’ve been holding for, in some cases, thirty years?

So, I always jump at the opportunity to get a new-old game still in the packaging because all of this uncertainty melts away and I know everything that’s supposed to be there is there. There’s also something incredibly satisfying about the anticipation of tearing open a brand new game for the first time just like when I a kid.

An Incomplete Collection

I’ve always considered myself a fan of the Kirby series but for a long time never owned or really properly played any title (my first copy was Kirby Super Star on the SNES). I think the issue with Kirby’s Adventure might have been that it was released very late in the licensed area for the NES and I had simply moved my focus to SNES at that point. No matter the reason, now that I’m much older and wiser I have been looking to fill out my classic NES collection with some missing gems.

Opening The Box

Recently, a factory sealed copy of Kirby’s Adventure had the good fortune (?) to find its way into my possession and I don’t think there is much else I need to explain about my intention to open the box or why. But, I do want to share the experience as much as it can be. I also want to document the knowledge of what was really in that box both for posterity and to help out anyone else who might not be lucky enough to find a sealed copy and is left wondering what, if anything, their opened copy might be missing.

Without further ado:

Kirby’s Adventure was released in North America in May of 1993 so this box has been sealed for over a quarter of a century at this point. I feel like it’s something of a time capsule by now and the time has come for it to reveal its secrets:

Something that I really miss is the crisp, distinctive smell that new boxed games and software always had back in the day. I think it was probably from the printed materials but I’ve found that even items that have been sealed have all lost this quality after twenty or more years. Some items, even in otherwise good condition take on a musty smell but at least this Kirby here has avoided that. It might be due to how it was stored.

Everything inside the box is, as expected, in pristine condition:

As you can see, the complete set of inserts includes not just the instruction manual but also a poster, a safety information booklet, and a Nintendo Power subscription form. All pretty standard fare for the time by my recollection. It’s really funny how the ancillary paper inserts really round out the collection if you are collector and completionist when no one paid them a second thought or might have even found them to be an annoyance back then. (All those PC game registration cards I sent in! What was I thinking!?)

It’s interesting to me that the cartridge itself is wrapped in plastic within the sealed box. This isn’t something that I remember seeing in the past. It’s possible it’s just me or that this is more unusual (perhaps because Kirby is a latter NES title?). The foam brick to fill the extra space in the box is common and begs the question why Nintendo just didn’t make the standard box size smaller?

The box and manual front and back are pretty easy to see online since they were commonly preserved but here are some close-ups just the same:

The Nintendo Power subscription card really is blast for from the past. Nostalgia overload right here:

All this power for just $15!? Why, I’d be a sucker not to take it! But seriously, it’s incredible how much I like having one of these simple ads again just for the historical context. They were a dime-a-dozen back in the day and I subscribed to Nintendo Power for years but I didn’t manage to keep even one despite the stacks of manuals I did hold on to all these years. You’d have never thought twice about it then but now that it is completely useless it suddenly seems to have intrinsic value.

The poster is also a commonly seen insert:

This is pretty generic and there were many different ones produced; just a simple and cheap promotional item inserted with most games. I do have a bunch of these mixed in with my old manuals collection. There’s nothing about this poster that ties it back to the specific game. It could have been (and probably was) just included with any old game and if you found one now loose in your closet you’d be hard pressed to match it back to the game it came with. Short of finding a lot more sealed Kirby copies and opening them, there’s no good way to know if the same or different poster was inserted with each copy on the same production run.

A Rare Find?

If we look closer at the box we can see that this is a “Rev-A” copy of the game:

Now, I am no expert on this and I don’t pretend to be. But, when I purchased this the eBay listing made a big deal about how this was the “rare Rev-A” copy of the game. While there are two known variants of the ROM, my understanding is that the Rev-A on the box actually refers to the packaging itself. As far as I can tell a Rev-B never existed meaning you can and do find both versions of the ROM within boxes marked Rev-A.

The ROM dump of this particular cartridge (performed with an INL Kazzo via anago_wx) is identified by GoodNES as the PRG0 revision. The Cutting Room Floor also calls this PRG0 (as identified by the string at 0x7FFF0) and claims it is the earlier revision. I also computed the CRC32 for PRG as 0x9077A623 which matches profile 2 in BootGod’s database. Interestingly, profile 1 is marked as “Revision A” in the database caption but GoodNES identifies the ROM with the corresponding CRC32 value (0x8FFF3F32) as PRG1 (which it must be based upon simple elimination).

This is all somewhat muddled but based upon the chip time-codes in the database for PRG0 (9314) and PRG1 (9334) it does seem like the chips containing PRG0 were produced earlier and therefore must be the earlier revision. So, if the Rev-A on the box did indeed refer to the ROM revision then this would make sense but it doesn’t actually prove the connection nor does it actually establish that the variant is rarer as the listing claimed.

I really can’t tell whether PRG0 or PRG1 is more common based on any of this. For what it’s worth there are 3 additional profiles in the BootGod database matching the PRG0 checksum which would seem to suggest a wider proliferation of cartridges with that revision but it’s really circumstantial to think that. In any case, rare or not, it’s still a gorgeous copy of a great game and I’m happy to add it to my collection: