Sky Skipper's been found!

[Manspeed]

arcadeblogger.com/2016/05/20/nintendo-sky-skipper/

Here's the skinny: Sky Skipper was released in Japan between Donkey Kong and Popeye, but never performed well enough for Nintendo to consider releasing it overseas. As a result, it was never really widely released and most of its remaining PCBs were converted to Popeye.

For the past 35 years, nobody had ever seen a functional Sky Skipper PCB or cabinet in the wild. Despite not getting a North American release, a US-style upright cabinet is still pictured on the Japanese flyer. And there's also a working ROM dump of the game, which means that at least one living PCB had to be out there.

Luckily, our collector friend in the above article managed to find a Popeye PCB that used to be Sky Skipper... and he got his techie friend to restore it back to its former life! They're now currently working on recreating the supposed upright cabinet, which means... Sky Skipper lives!

[Leon]

That's really cool, thanks for sharing.

[parrothead]

Strangely, there's an Atari 2600 version.

[Nester the Lark]

According to Nintendo Life, Nintendo of America still has the only Sky Skipper arcade cabinet ever made, but they granted access to it to the Sky Skipper restoration project to help with their reproduction. You can see a picture of it at the link.

[Manspeed]

So NoA only produced a grand total of one Sky Skipper?

Makes you wonder how many Japanese cocktail cabinets are out there...

[Da Robot]

www.skyskipperproject.com/our-day-at-noa/

Sky Skipper project reveals HOW they even got access to and what they saw while at NOA.

Wow, just wow, after all that time who they had to find to get a contact in NoA who knew what they wanted.

[Nester the Lark]

The restored Sky Skipper was finally debuted this past weekend.

[Leon]

They've done a really good job, kudos to them.