Ninety-Seven Sealed NES Mario Cartridges Sat Forgotten in a Wisconsin Storage Room Until Someone Opened the Box

Photo credit: NintendoWire
Kevin Braun runs OneStopWonders, a small retro shop in Waukesha, Wisconsin, about fifteen miles west of Milwaukee. Six years ago a man walked in with a plain rectangular box and sold it to him. The seller explained that his grandfather had operated a precious-metal recovery business. Nintendo had once sent the company old NES circuit boards so the gold contacts could be melted down and salvaged. This particular box never made it into the furnace. Instead it sat in a garage for more than twenty years before landing in Braun’s temperature-controlled storage unit.

Jason Ganos, editor-in-chief of Nintendo Wire and a lifetime Nintendo fan, stopped by the shop for some normal work. While Braun was showing him the ropes, he revealed that he still had an old box of NES games that he’d been saving for a while. Ganos expected to find some run-of-the-mill used copies of Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt, you know, the pack-in cartridge that came with all those old Action Set consoles, but when he opens the box, he is astonished to find something quite different.

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Ninety-seven cartridges were sealed inside, each wrapped in its own clear plastic bag, just like Nintendo used to do with new consoles and console games. Behind each one, there was a printed manual. There were stickers on the outside of the box with a mix of English and Japanese text, with one listing a December 1995 ship date and another simply saying ‘100 pcs of Super Mario Bros / Duck Hunt’, while another stated that three of the original hundred had gone missing somewhere along the way, leaving the remaining 97 looking as if they’d never been touched.

Ganos chose to share a few images of the lot with his private high-end collecting club. Within hours after publishing, two directors from different grading businesses messaged him, and both agreed that either the games were extremely intricate fakes or brand-new, never-documented varieties of the games.

Ganos placed all of the cartridges into a case, flew to California the next day, and gave them in person to Professional Sports Authenticator.PSA thoroughly examined the boards, labels, manuals, and manufacture codes, and each and every one passed the test with flying colors, indicating that they were 100% original. Five of them received a flawless 10 rating from PSA, the first time that mark was given to a NES cartridge. Sixty more got 9.8. Thirty-one people scored 9.6. One had a score of 9.4. They then encapsulated each cartridge, together with its original manual, which was a first for the company, as far as I know.

When they took a closer look, they saw why the cartridges were different. The back labels were in many languages, not simply English, as with the ‘regular’ models. The manufacture codes indicated that they were produced in the 40th week of 1993, late August of that year, which was later than any other known batch of Super Mario Bros / Duck Hunt cartridges. The wording in the manuals changed slightly but consistently, from’maintenance or repairs’ to’maintenance or service’ in all documented copies. The circuit boards contained text that could not be found in any previous versions of the game.

Nobody knows for sure why Nintendo created this small batch of games. Some theories include that they were a lot of warranty replacement stock, parts for refurbished consoles, or even a planned bundle that never made it to retailers. Whatever the reason, the games never made it to retail stores. They left Japan, traveled to Nintendo of America, and were eventually designated for gold recovery. Braun had planned to sell each one for ten or fifteen dollars. Collectors are now willing to spend four-figure sums for perfect tens, with flawless tens expected to rise even higher. Goldin Auctions will host an auction beginning August 12 to determine the value of a sealed, never-before-seen variant of Super Mario Bros / Duck Hunt.
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