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One of the holy grails of NES gaming archaeology has been spotted in the wild! Nintendo had negotiated the rights from Maxis to produce Sim City for their 8-bit hardware and while the original Super Nintendo version is acclaimed as one of the very best iterations of Will Wright's city-building opus, all the ground work was already produced for the NES before it was quietly shelved away.

Until now that is, because seemingly out of nowhere not one but two fully-functional prototypes fell in the hands of BIGDADDYRAMIREZ, owner of the Back in Time chain of game stores in Seattle, USA. He was quick to throw both prototypes at a NES-101 (the Top Loader as it is know among NES enthusiasts) and made a quick video of the result.

The game will be available to play to anyone visiting this year's edition of the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Hopefully in the future the ROM information will be dumped and preserved so everyone else can enjoy yet another lost piece of gaming history.

Hands up in the comments if you ever played the Super Nintendo version of Sim City without the "holding L" cheat in the tax menu for that sweet yet illegal $999.999.

[source gonintendo.com]