Golf (NES) - Authentic Nintendo Black Box Sports Series Cartridge, Tested & Cleaned

The game everyone said would not fit

Nintendo wanted an eighteen-hole golf game for the Famicom launch. They asked outside software houses to build it, and the outside software houses said no, because eighteen holes of course data would not fit in the memory a 1984 cartridge had to work with. Which was a reasonable thing to believe.

A young programmer at HAL Laboratory disagreed, wrote his own data compression routine, and squeezed the whole thing in himself. It was the second game he ever programmed for Nintendo, after Pinball.

His name was Satoru Iwata. Twenty-odd years later he was Nintendo’s president.

So this unremarkable-looking black cartridge with a pixel guy in a red shirt on it is one of the earliest surviving artifacts of the person who would go on to run the company, and it exists at all because he refused to accept that the memory budget was the memory budget.

The part that will get you in the feelings

When Iwata died in 2015, somebody at Nintendo hid a complete, playable, emulated copy of this game inside the Nintendo Switch’s system firmware.

It was not in any menu. Nobody announced it. Dataminers found it, and then worked out how to reach it: set the console’s date to July 11, the day Iwata died, and perform a Joy-Con motion that mimics the hand gesture he was known for in Nintendo Direct presentations. Do it right and the Switch drops you into 1984 NES Golf, which the file was internally named “Flog” for. Golf, backwards.

It was quietly removed in system firmware 4.0.0. For a while, every Switch on earth was carrying a secret memorial to its author, in the form of the game that made his name, and nobody was supposed to know.

That is a lot of history for a fifteen dollar cartridge.

The golf game itself, briefly

It is 1984 golf and it is better than it has any business being. Eighteen holes, a three-click power and accuracy swing that every golf game since has borrowed, wind, club selection, and a putting green view. One or two players, alternating. It is genuinely playable rather than merely historic, which is not something you can say about most launch-window sports titles.

The pixel golfer on the label, incidentally, is wearing Mario’s colors and Mario’s hat, because in 1984 Nintendo put Mario in everything. In Japan the sprite is straightforwardly Mario. Look at the label again.

What you actually get, and what I checked

This is a black box era Sports Series cart, Made in Japan, label intact with the light surface scuffing you would expect from something made the year the NES launched in America. It powered on, booted, and played.

I opened it, which is not standard practice for a fifteen dollar game and is the reason photos 2, 3 and 4 exist. Inside is a genuine NES-NROM-128-03 board marked (c)1986 Nintendo, with the lockout chip and both mask ROMs date-coded to week 42 of 1987. That is what a real Golf cart looks like inside, and now you have seen it, which is more than you get from anyone selling you a photo of a label.

One thing worth disclosing: the case screws are slotted flat-head, not the 3.8 mm security screws Nintendo shipped. Somebody had this cart open before I did. The board is unquestionably genuine and everything on it is correct, so this is a note about the cart’s history rather than a problem with it.

A very good bundle add-on

Golf is the cheapest interesting thing in the shop. It is a launch title, it has a better story attached to it than games costing ten times as much, and it is small, light and fun to hand to somebody who has never played a game older than they are. Add it to a restored NES and it costs you almost nothing.