betabox

Is it the one that has just a trailer for the game? According to Cutting Room Floor, 500 copies were sent out to attendees at that E3 where it was showcased. A lot of people go nuts over E3 stuff (and stuff from other expos), especially if it's early game builds like previews, demos, etc. Still, this trailer cart is probably sought after; I'd say keep an eye on that ebay listing to see where the price goes. I'm sure 1st party Nintendo collectors would be interested in it. $350 isn't surprising, to be honest.

I dipped into this pre-release material years back and intended to soak up more, but never got around to it and eventually forgot. The things you talked about with early monster and weapon properties are great and I really enjoyed your showcasing the maps. Good job!

In high school, a few of my friends were into games from the 80's and 90's, including Doom. It got worse in college. There was only 1 person that I knew who wouldn't complain about the "bad graphics", things looking stupid, little details being unrealistic, etc.

^ Yeah, and this barely even scratches the surface. With any items in the high-end video game collecting scenes, $1000 is damn cheap. And that's just video games.

Officer, this man right here.

I remember zdoom on the notgod domain. Anyway, people talked about Phoebus being very paranoid about users on his forum joining other Doom communities, stories of banning users for this and just banning users for seemingly no reason. My first account on there was in awaiting approval status for a long time and then it just got banned. I did eventually get an account approved, but the forum wasn't so active by then. Eventually my second account either got banned or dropped due to inactivity, and that was that. I vaguely recall having a couple noteworthy discussions with users and in threads.

You don't really hear about this (or any interesting dev stuff, really) because unfortunately these kinds of things are almost always just circulated among private collectors who have no actual interest in the items. I got the tipoff from a huge prototype collection list and it became a bit of an obsession to find that proto. Later I got in contact with another collector who had a SNES Doom beta/dev version. He only did a quick comparison with a youtube video and some info I provided about the full game. It had 27 working levels already accessible in a list; no music, menus, difficulty selection, probably sounds missing. He just checked a couple of levels, but didn't look in detail. I couldn't get him to check further since he didn't really care (and the classic "no time"). He traded it and some other betas for 1st party Nintendo dev stuff. If anyone considers tracking it down, good luck with that. After spending so long and especially more money than I should have in hopes of acquiring this build, I gave up. It's one of those things where it's more likely to turn up on eBay or the like if the owner wants to do that, rather than you finding it yourself (unless you got dumb money to burn).

There is a prototype as what I said, it's just not "floating around", which is why it won't be on TCRF any time soon, if ever.

For the level slots, just use a cheat device/patch codes. For example, since Computer Station is the sixth map of E1 (there's no Central Processing), you'd expect it to load if you set the level select value to 6; instead, it hangs the game on a black screen. Computer Station loads when you set it to 7. Same goes for the values of the maps in the other episodes that have levels missing before them. EDIT: The level values may actually start with 0, but the point still remains.

Somewhat related, there's a prototype version of SNES Doom which is missing a lot of assets, but has the cut levels. That might explain why the game's data has 27 level slots.

^ Yeah, I got the DN3D bug right after finishing Maximum Doom. After going through the DukeZone 500 maps, I put myself through the Duke Assault 1500 maps.

OP, you apologize to this poor soul right now

These kinds of shovelware items especially make me wish Greyghost were still around. Yeah it's tangentially related, but it's the first thing that came to mind. He mentioned having a few oddities like this in his collection.

Another for Greyghost.