PSA Verifies Early Pokémon Red Prototype in $25,000 Goldin Auction

A 1998 prototype of Pokémon Red for the Nintendo Game Boy has entered the market with a current bid of $25,000. The listing on the Goldin auction site shows one active bid as of October 23, 2026. Retro Dodo first identified the item, describing it as incredibly rare.

Specialists at PSA authenticated the cartridge before its appearance at auction. They could not perform a full data read but successfully accessed the first 32KB of the contents. PSA labeled this partial read technically unique. The grading report states that the accessible game data is completely identical to the U.S. retail version. The company expressed confidence that the unreadable remainder matches the standard release.

The PSA report highlights two differences in the ROM header data. Neither change affects gameplay. One difference appears at offset 0x014C, which denotes the Mask ROM version. The value is set to 55 instead of the correct 00. This error changes the calculated header checksum at offset 0x014D to CB rather than 20.

The physical cartridge features a sticker reading DMB-MBC-16M-FLASH and the part number DMG-(F)KGDB-01. The report interprets DMB as Dot Matrix Game, the Game Boy's original internal codename. MBC stands for Memory Bank Controller. This custom chip allowed games to exceed the Game Boy's 32KB ROM limit. The 16M designation indicates 16 megabits of flash-writable memory. Retro Dodo noted that the unit is physically longer than a standard Game Boy cartridge.

The auction lists the board as previously undocumented, though the part number has appeared in other records. The Rare Gaming Dump wiki lists the same number for a 2000 development cartridge. That item also used a 16-megabit Sharp flash chip labeled U1 FLASH MEMORY. Images in the Goldin listing show a design nearly identical to the wiki entry, but the sticker on that older item reads DMG-MBC3-16M-FLASH.

Pokémon Red launched in the 1990s alongside Green and Blue. The combined titles sold more than 31 million copies. A reader comment on the original report suggested this copy is a master that powers on and plays normally. The commenter also cited a 2015 sale of demo cartridges by a Nintendo employee who kept them instead of destroying them. These claims remain unverified.