Question: (EGM #77, December 1995) did this happen? Amazingly this competition is printed on the game's box but I don't think I've ever seen it discussed. There doesn't appear to be a dump of the special cartridge - are there winners amongst us?? (that Cutthoat island competition might need checking too)
I'm shocked no one replied. I found an article from the Jan 12, 1996 issue of "Business Wire" via The Free library, stating that a 12 year old boy named Keola Kaula was the winner of the contest. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/12-year-old+gamer+wins+$25,000+cash+grand+prize+in+Sega's+videogame...-a017793447 Was he the only winner? And his copy must be floating around somewhere I would assume... They stated in the magazine article that they would ship out another copy of the game to the winner and they held on to the winning cart. So either that cartridge is lost, or no one has bothered to dump the ROM yet.
This is something I've sorta looked into every now and again. As far as I know we only know about the one winner in the post above, but I think I remember reading that there were supposed to be at least six winning cartridges out there when the contest was running? I think it was six, it's been a bit. I'd really love to see this someday, but it'd probably take someone winning the lottery and buying up the world's stock of Vectorman cartridges or something.
Going by my recollection, based on research Sega-16 did, Keola Kaula ended up in jail, or something. While this doesn't add anything substantial to the main point of the topic, it is an interesting footnote. :v:
I think with the extremely limited amount of cartridges "out there" this edition of the game might be lost in oblivion. Maybe we could get lucky on Ebay?
Theoretically 101 special cartridges were produced, and you're looking for any that weren't sent back to Sega in exchange for a prize. And they can only be identified after completing the game. And there were millions of Vectorman carts produced in total. The numbers are against you.
I mean, then again we did get our hands on the Spinball carts with the older music so... *shrug* Maybe it'll just turn up one day. I've never actually played my vectorman cart all the way through so I have no idea technically :P
The Spinball cart is visually different than normal carts (no shell, eeproms), so it was much easier to identify. I think I still have it somewhere..
I think in this case, if we have a physical cart of Vectorman, we should try to beat it to check. I have a physical cart, but have not ben able to beat it. So I have no idea if it's a winner.
On the bright side, I would assume that it would be fairly easy to ask somebody to swap carts with you, if you find that yours isn't the winner, compared to asking somebody to give up their copy of the game. I mean, not everybody would want to sell theirs, but a straight trade Vectorman-for-Vectorman would be easier. That, or if we told people about what we were doing, we could offer to send people trades so we could cycle through various carts, the people sending theirs in don't lose anything if they decide to help out, and we can add in who the original owner when documenting having found a copy. (Plus, a promise to send back the cart once verified, since it would prove to be a collector's item and it would make it more valuable.)
If there's only one revision, then it might be possible to check it with an Action Replay or Game Genie. Write a code that inserts the checksum for the currently known revision. If it loads normally, then it's a standard cart. If it doesn't, then it's a new ROM that needs dumping. This depends on Vectorman having a checksum routine.
