These lots contained warehouse materials SNK USA had shipped back after its US offices closed in early 2000.

It turns out her husband had bought auction lots from an ex-SNK employee in China. Weiss visited the woman to see if there was anything worth potentially buying and restoring - and it was in her field that he saw six pallets of unknown origin sitting under a collapsed tree. She said she bought it from a woman whose husband had owned a pinball and arcade machine repair and vendor company that went out of business in the late '90s. Curious as to its origin, he asked his client who they had obtained the pinball machine from. He had received a call from a client to repair a pinball machine, which was in a particularly bad way. This prototype was found by Sacramento-based pinball machine repair specialist Craig Weiss under a tree in a field in California.

Now, a prototype version of Samurai Shodown 64 dated early 1997 has been found - the first Hyper Neo Geo 64 development hardware ever seen - and it has made its way into the hands of Anthony Bacon, a video game collector from Chicago. It was SNK's first 3D fighting game, following in the footsteps of 3D fighting game big hitters such as Tekken and Soulcalibur. Samurai Shodown 64, known as Samurai Spirits in Japan, is one of those seven games. The Hyper Neo Geo 64 was meant to herald SNK's emergence into the new era of 3D gaming that emerged in the mid-'90s, but it failed to find an audience and reached the end of its life just two years later in 1999 with only seven games under its belt. Samurai Shodown 64 is a December 1997 fighting game released for the Hyper Neo Geo 64, the arcade system created by SNK as the successor to the Neo Geo MVS. It had been sitting there for 20 years, retro video game collectors believe. A never-before-seen Hyper Neo Geo 64 Samurai Shodown 64 prototype was found sitting under a tree in a Californian field recently.

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