Video game collector Jason Ganos was helping to fix a pinball machine at a Waukesha game and collectable shop when the owner mentioned he had a box of old Nintendo games in a storage unit behind the store.
“I start panicking, like, ‘What is this thing? Oh my God! I’ve been a game collector for 20 years, I need to see this box,’” Ganos said.
Kevin Braun, owner of the OneStopWonders shop, bought the box from a man who stopped in about two years before looking to sell. The man said the box belonged to his grandfather who owned a metal scrapping business.
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Braun brought Ganos to check out the contents of the box. Inside, he found what was — to a game collector — a treasure.
There were 97 untouched cartridges of Super Mario Brothers Duck Hunt. Each copy was wrapped in plastic and had its own manual. Their condition was pristine.
But these games were not only in perfect condition, they were especially rare. The cartridges were of a discontinued variant of the game produced by the company in a tiny run more than three decades ago.
“If you pop the game into a system, it’s the exact same game, but everything else is a little bit different,” Ganos said. “The motherboard is different, or the system board, the manual has different language in it, and the back of the cart is multilingual, which this game never had before.”
Ganos said these differences may be small, but they are very sought after in the video game collecting world.
Super Mario Brothers Duck Hunt was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System console in 1988. The game was discontinued in 1991, but the copies found by Ganos date back to 1993 according to the shipping label on their box.
“We found out that this specific variant of this game has never been seen before,” he said. “This specific variant of the game was essentially produced two years after the last known print run of this game. So for whatever reason, Nintendo decided to make an extra print run of 100 of these.”
Ganos said he thinks Nintendo produced the extra copies for warranty repairs. He said they ended up in Wisconsin to have their metals extracted — NES cartridges contain small traces of gold.
“These games were sent to a precious metal recovery service we believe in Wisconsin, and they were supposed to be essentially scrapped for gold. And for whatever reason, that just never happened,” Ganos said.
After the discovery, Ganos said he flew the cartridges to the Professional Sports Authority in Los Angeles to be graded. PSA is an industry leader in grading collectibles. The grades are based on their condition, with the scale running from one to 10. The higher the grade, the more valuable the item — a grade of 10 means the collectable hasn’t been unboxed and is in perfect condition. Ganos said five of the 97 cartridges graded a 10.
“Getting a 10 is almost unheard of. In fact, for NES games, for NES carts, we got the first 10s that ever existed at PSA,” he said.
Braun said that he didn’t know the cartridges were rare — and valuable — until researching further with Ganos.
“I didn’t realize what we had, I thought they were just regular NES games of Mario. I was gonna sell them for $10 to $15,” Braun said. “It’s unreal, but I’m just taking it day by day.”
He said the discovery has been increasing traffic to his shop.
“It’s bringing a lot more people in and into downtown Waukesha as well. It’s been a crazy ride,” he said.
The cartridges are going to be sold in an online auction that starts Friday and ends Sept. 9. Ganos said that it’s hard to predict how much they will sell for but anticipates the auction to go well.
“I’ve said it could go for hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars. It’s all just kind of speculation on what somebody’s willing to pay for it,” he said, “I think what we have going for us is that it’s a new variant, and that it’s a perfect 10, which has never existed before.”
Both Braun and Ganos said they are going to keep one of the perfectly graded copies of the game. They also plan to display the shipping box in Braun’s store. Ganos said he thinks the chances of these variants of Duck Hunt being found in other parts of the world are low.
“Everybody we’ve talked to in the game preservation space that collects, they thought that we’ve had every variant of this game already documented,” he said. “But here we are, in this tiny little shop in this tiny little town that happens to have a new variant of this.”
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