With 97 NES cartridges packed into a suitcase, Jason Ganos boarded a flight to California and spent the whole trip anxious that TSA agents might pull them apart for inspection.
That never happened. Which is why one of the oddest discoveries in Nintendo collecting history reached a grading table in one piece.
None of this was something Ganos, the owner of the website NintendoWire, had gone looking for. For roughly three months he’d been lending a hand to a local collector, Kevin Braun, on pinball machine repairs when Braun brought up some games sitting unused in his stock. PlayStation titles. GameCube. Super Nintendo. The sort of inventory you’d expect from someone running a vintage shop.
Then Braun mentioned the box.
The story behind the box sounds made up
A seller had turned up at Braun’s store, OneStopWonders, six years earlier with a box of NES cartridges in hand. That seller’s account was that the carts had belonged to their grandfather, who had reportedly been employed by a precious metal recovery service. As the story went, Nintendo needed to move stock quickly and, instead of dumping the cartridges, offloaded them to the recovery outfit for a modest sum so the gold could be extracted from the circuit boards.
To Ganos, the account sounded somewhat far-fetched. Understandably so. Yet regardless of how you read the provenance claim, what was inside the box was tougher to dispute.
Roughly 71,000 people live in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and its downtown appears frozen somewhere in the ’50s. Soda shops, burger joints, antique stores. OneStopWonders is one of them, its shelves filled with VHS tapes, retro games and vintage clothing for anybody with a Gen X or Millennial itch to scratch.
Three stickers were affixed to the box, each printed in English and Japanese. A ship date of December 1, 1995 appeared on one. Another detailed what was inside: 100 pcs of Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt for the NES.
The first oddity is that date. As a pack-in title, Duck Hunt came bundled with NES console purchases. And by December 1995, the NES was well into the tail end of its life cycle.
He posted photos and then deleted them fast
Of the original 100, 97 remained in the box, wrapped individually, each carrying a manual on the back of the cart. Where the missing three ended up is anyone’s guess.
Ganos assumed they held little value. After all, Duck Hunt ranks among the most widely distributed games in NES history. So he posted photos to a collector Facebook group, anticipating nothing more than mild curiosity.
Instead, a director at one of the world’s largest grading companies and a director of PSA Games got in touch to say something looked unusual, and asked him to photograph the internals of a cartridge in detail, circuit boards included.
“They both told me the same thing: ‘These are either fake, or these are brand-new, never-before-seen variants of these games,'” Ganos said. “Like, the back label is different. The manual has different language in the back. There’s different dates listed in the back of the manual. The motherboard is completely different. There’s text on the motherboard that is not on any known copies of Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt.”
A late 1993 manufacturing date is indicated by the manuals, which would establish these as the latest prints of the game ever documented. By that point the Facebook post was attracting far too many eyes. Ganos took it down and got PSA on the phone.
He was on a plane within hours.
Five perfect 10s, a first for an NES cartridge
All 97 were authenticated by PSA. The grades followed: 60 9.8s, 31 9.6s, one 9.4 and five perfect 10s. No NES cartridge had ever received a 10 from PSA before.
“We were shocked,” said Claire Shelton, Head of PSA Video Games. “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.’
“We look at so many things, and everything has at least some flaws, so for these to be as good as they were… we’re looking for perfection, or at least as close to it as you can come. Because with injection-molded parts, there’s always going to be pulloff lines right from where something is detached from a mold, or just the intricacies of manufacturing are going to leave things with a little bit of inconsistency. We were very grateful to be able to identify four of these that met that standard.”
The entire collection was serialized by PSA, with each copy encapsulated alongside its manual — another first for the company.
What actually makes them rare
Shelton points to three factors: they came unopened directly from the manufacturer, they represent a new variant with a manual on the back of every cart, and they bear a bilingual back label.
“There just aren’t very many of those, and for Nintendo to have gone out of its way to create a new variant for whatever reason, then presumably not letting any of those see the light of day… it would be pretty unusual for Nintendo to do a new sticker variant for literally 100 copies,” Shelton said. “You’d typically expect that number to be much, much higher, like into the thousands for revisions, especially for a game like Mario / Duck Hunt, which had many millions of copies sold in its lifetime.”
Braun’s temperature-controlled storage unit deserves less of the credit than you might assume. Something far cheaper did the heavy lifting.
“Even without movement, dust can cause scratches and micro-wear over time. If these had not been bagged, I feel confident saying that there would not have been any tens. Those bags did a whole lot of work,” Shelton said.
Nobody wants to name a number, but here’s one anyway
A firm valuation was something Shelton declined to give, although she floated a four-to-five-figure range.
“Four digits would be the floor,” she said. “Multiple thousands of dollars, for sure. Given that the public will be able to ascertain that the 10 rate was roughly 4%, I think it could easily be in the five digits. I wouldn’t expect it to exceed the five digits, but I’ve been surprised before and I’d love to be surprised here. I do think this is the kind of thing that, given the novelty and if you’re a betting person, I wouldn’t expect more of these to show up, and the odds that they’re gonna be in better condition than these is also quite unlikely.”
August 12 saw three of the cartridges go to auction via Goldin Auctions. Bidding stays open for three weeks, with a tentative close of September 9. Ganos has said he would like to auction one for charity as well, though nothing firm is in place yet.
“It feels completely surreal that this happened,” Ganos said. “I think it makes it even more surreal that I happened to live in this tiny little small town, with this tiny little downtown area, with a tiny little retro shop, and I ended up making friends with the guy who had this thing in storage for six years.
“Nintendo has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. And Mario Brothers Duck Hunt is the very first video game I ever remember playing, so it’s surreal and it’s fantastical, and I’m just happy that this all fell on my lap. It just feels really cool to be part of this type of Nintendo history.”