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Rare Super Mario games found in Wisconsin
A collection of rare, untouched Super Mario game cartridges were found in Waukesha. Jason Ganos with Nintendo Wire joined the Wisconsin Live Desk to discuss the “once in a lifetime” find.
WAUKESHA, Wis. -A collection of rare, untouched Super Mario game cartridges were found in Waukesha. Jason Ganos with Nintendo Wire joined the Wisconsin Live Desk to discuss the “once in a lifetime” find.
“Very big deal”
Ganos said he’s been collecting for about 20 years and thought he’d seen it all. A friend of his owns OneStopWonders in downtown Waukesha and asked Ganos for help selling some things he’d accumulated over the years.
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Inside a “strange box” in a storage unit, Ganos said they found 97 Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt cartridges that had been purchased years earlier and forgotten about.
Ganos said, in the early 1990s, Nintendo wanted the cartridges destroyed, so the company sent a box of 100 cartridges to be scrapped for precious metal in Wisconsin. Instead, for whatever reason, they ended up in his friend’s hands.
The store planned to sell the games for $10 to $15 each, Ganos said, and they’re a pretty common game at face value. But because of the brand new, uncirculated condition, Ganos started to research what they found. He posted about the games and got a “universal” response that they had something unique on their hands – not only because of the condition of the cartridges but because of the back label on the games’ motherboard.
“In the video game community, it’s a very, very big deal. This is one of the most documented video games in history, and to find a new variant that pretty much was sitting in a warehouse for 30 years, that’s something that’s special,” Ganos said.
How much are they worth?
It’s not clear what the games are worth. Ganos said they’re putting three copies up at Golden Auctions on Aug. 12. He said, in the history of Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) grading for collectibles, there’s never been a Nintendo or NES cartridge graded at 10. He said the games they found included five such scores, making them the first PSA 10 finds of their kind.
