A forgotten cardboard box, 97 brand-new copies of the NES game Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, and one very happy man. “I still don’t quite believe that any of this is happening,” Jason Ganos said. “I just think it’s kind of serendipitous that this happened. It’s just still very bizarre to me.” The backstory here is that a pop culture store owner in Wisconsin, Kevin Braun, mentioned to Ganos, a well-known Nintendo game collector, that he had a box of Super Mario cartridges that had been sitting in storage for years. Even Ganos, a man who has been collecting Nintendo material for two decades, didn’t expect this box to contain an ultra-rare collection of 97 “absolutely pristine” copies of Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, a popular game from 1988.
It should be noted that there is nothing extraordinary about the game itself; it is the version that is rare. Braun, who owned them, also thought these were ordinary $15 cartridges because Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt is everywhere. But Ganos’s two decades of collecting experience told him there might be more to the box. A closer look soon confirmed his hunch, and he couldn’t have been happier with what he discovered. It didn’t take long for Ganos to hop onto an early 5 am flight with all 97 cartridges to keep him company till California for PSA grading. While explaining the “97 little circuit boards” to airport security wasn’t fun, everything that followed was.
This mysterious 1993 production run, which collectors had never documented, consisted of unused cartridges. In addition, five became the first NES cartridges to receive PSA’s perfect 10 grade. As a result, three of the cartridges are set to hit the auction block this month at Goldin, and could fetch millions, according to Wisn.com. Ganos was clearly right when he said, “It’s like pulling out like a Holy Grail.” I wouldn’t describe it any other way. The carton, tucked underneath boxes of old Halloween decorations, was clearly meant for greater things. Selling them for about $15 apiece, as Kevin aimed to do, wasn’t one of those things. Only a few weeks earlier a forgotten $90 Nintendo bundle from 1986 became a $3 million treasure, as a sticker-sealed Super Mario Bros. cartridge leaped an unbelievable 3,333,233% in value after nearly 40 untouched years.
