Aug. 11 (UPI) — A box of games brought into a Wisconsin retro store turned out to contain a video gaming history mystery: 97 copies of a previously unknown variant of Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt for the original Nintendo.
Jason Ganos, owner of gaming website Nintendo Wire, was asked by Kevin Braun, owner of the One Stop Wonders retro store in Waukesha, to help sell a backlog of video games.
Among the stock was a box of Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges that had been brought into the store by a seller about six years ago. The seller told Braun the box had wound up in the possession of his grandfather, who worked for a precious metal recovery service.
The seller said Nintendo had turned the games over to the service so gold could be extracted from the circuit boards, but the games never made it into recovery.
Ganos opened the box and discovered 97 plastic-wrapped copies of Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, the game that came bundled with the NES.
A closer examination soon revealed the games were highly unusual — a variant edition of the cartridges that were previously completely unknown to the gaming community.
“The back sticker on the cartridge is different. The screws are different. The manual is different. Even the motherboard for the game is different. So this is one of the most-documented games in the history of video game preservation and nobody has seen these specific carts before,” Ganos told WISN-TV.
Ganos examined the insides of one of the cartridges and discovered a date code from late August 1993 — two years after the last known printing of the game.
“Our best theory is that these cartridges were produced either as replacement stock for warranty repairs and refurbished systems or for a bundle that was planned but never released,” Ganos wrote on Nintendo Wire. “The truth is, though, nobody knows for certain. For now, the exact reason these cartridges were manufactured is just one more mystery surrounding this incredible discovery.”
Ganos took the games to grading company Professional Sports Authenticator, and was in for yet another surprise: five of the examined games were rated PSA 10, becoming the very first NES cartridges to ever receive a perfect score from the organization.
“We were shocked,” Claire Shelton, head of PSA Video Games, told IGN. “It almost felt too good to be true. We’ve looked at so many examples over the years. Our graders have graded hundreds of thousands of examples across all platforms, and it’s often the case with tens where you almost start doubting yourself. You’re like, ‘I must be missing something. There’s no way it could be perfect.'”
As for the rest of the cartridges, 60 were rated 9.8, 31 were rated 9.6 and one was rated 9.4.
Ganos and Braun decided to keep some of the cartridges for their private collections, while others will be auctioned and some will be set aside for charity auction. The first three examples are set to go on the block at Goldin actions on Wednesday, and are expected to fetch thousands of dollars.
