Jason Ganos flew to California with 97 NES cartridges in a suitcase, sweating the entire flight over whether TSA would take them apart.
They didn’t. And that’s how one of the strangest finds in Nintendo collecting history made it to a grading table intact.
Ganos, who owns the website NintendoWire, wasn’t looking for any of this. He’d been helping out a local collector named Kevin Braun with pinball machine repairs for about three months when Braun mentioned he had some games gathering dust in his stock. PlayStation stuff. GameCube. Super Nintendo. Normal inventory for a guy who runs a vintage shop.
Then Braun mentioned the box.
The story behind the box sounds made up
Six years ago, a seller walked into Braun’s store, OneStopWonders, carrying a box of NES cartridges. According to that seller, the cartridges had come from their grandfather, who supposedly worked for a precious metal recovery service. The claim was that Nintendo wanted to clear stock fast and, rather than dump the carts, sold them off to the recovery service for a small sum so the company could pull gold out of the circuit boards.
Ganos found the tale a bit fantastical. Fair enough. But whatever you think of the provenance story, the contents were harder to argue with.
Waukesha, Wisconsin has about 71,000 people and a downtown that looks like it never left the ’50s. Soda shops, burger joints, antique stores. OneStopWonders sits among them, stocked with VHS tapes, retro games and vintage clothes for anyone with a Gen X or Millennial itch to scratch.
The box itself had three stickers on it, printed in both English and Japanese. One listed a ship date of December 1, 1995. Another spelled out the contents: 100 pcs of Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt for the NES.
That date is the first weird part. Duck Hunt was a pack-in title, the game bundled with an NES console purchase. By December 1995 the NES was deep into the back end of its life cycle.
He posted photos and then deleted them fast
Ninety-seven of the original 100 were still inside, each one individually wrapped, each with a manual on the back of the cart. Nobody knows where the other three went.
Ganos figured they couldn't be worth much. Duck Hunt is one of the most widely distributed games in NES history. So he uploaded photos to a collector Facebook group, expecting some polite interest.
He got a director from one of the world’s biggest grading companies and a director of PSA Games telling him something seemed off, and asking him to shoot extensive photos of a cartridge’s guts, 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.”
The manuals point to a late 1993 manufacturing date, which would make these the latest prints of the game anyone has ever seen. The Facebook post was drawing too much attention by then. Ganos pulled it down and called PSA.
Hours later he was on the plane.
Five perfect 10s, a first for an NES cartridge
PSA authenticated all 97. Then came the grades: 60 9.8s, 31 9.6s, one 9.4 and five perfect 10s. PSA had never handed a 10 to an NES cartridge 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.”
PSA serialized the whole collection and encapsulated each copy with its manual. The company had never done that before either.
What actually makes them rare
Three things, per Shelton: they were unopened straight from the manufacturer, they’re a new variant with a manual on the back of each cart, and they carry 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 gets less credit here than you’d think. The real hero was cheaper than that.
“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
Shelton wouldn’t commit to a valuation, though she speculated somewhere in the 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.”
Three of the cartridges hit auction through Goldin Auctions on August 12. The window runs three weeks, tentatively closing September 9. Ganos said he’d also like to auction one off for charity, but nothing concrete has been set up 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.”
