Ninety-seven copies of a previously undocumented Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge variant for the Nintendo Entertainment System have surfaced at a retro game store in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and the first of them are now heading to auction. The find, reported by UPI News, is being described as one of the most significant discoveries in video game preservation history. That significance, however, comes with a hard question every serious collector knows well: when nobody can say what something is ultimately worth, how much is it reasonable to spend chasing it?
Collector Discipline and the Cap-and-Treat-It-as-Entertainment Rule
The auction’s unpredictable ceiling makes the Waukesha find a textbook case for a principle that experienced hobby spenders tend to apply by instinct. Three cartridges are scheduled to sell at Goldin Auctions and are expected to fetch thousands of dollars apiece, but “expected” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Final prices will depend on who shows up, what mood the market is in, and how much buyers trust a variant with no established sales history.
Jason Ganos, who co-managed the find, and Kevin Braun of One Stop Wonders each held cartridges back for their own collections. Others will go to auction. Still more have been reserved for a charity sale. That three-way split is, whether intentional or not, a model of the capped-and-disposable mindset in action: take what you value personally, release what the market will reward, and give the rest away. None of it is treated as a retirement fund.
The Rizik HR editorial team, which follows Croatia’s discretionary-entertainment and leisure-spending market, recognizes the same logic in a different context. Rizik HR sits inside that same capped discretionary-entertainment budget many Croatian readers draw from, and the identical rule applies there: set aside a fixed, disposable amount and treat whatever is spent as entertainment rather than investment. The logic travels across hobbies.
“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.”
From a Grandfather’s Possession to a Six-Year Backlog
The cartridges did not arrive through a collector’s estate sale or a warehouse liquidation. They came in through the front door of One Stop Wonders, a retro shop in Waukesha, carried by a seller whose grandfather had worked for a precious metal recovery service.
Kevin Braun owns the store. Jason Ganos, who runs the gaming website Nintendo Wire, was brought in to help work through a backlog of video games Braun had been accumulating. The box containing the 97 cartridges had been sitting in that backlog for approximately six years before anyone recognized what it held.
The grandfather’s employer had received the games from Nintendo directly. The arrangement was straightforward: Nintendo handed over the cartridges so gold could be extracted from the circuit boards. The games were never meant to survive. They simply never made it into the recovery process, and so they did.
Four Physical Differences and a Date Code That Should Not Exist
What distinguishes these cartridges from every previously documented copy of Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt is not subtle. Ganos laid it out plainly when describing the variant to WISN-TV.
“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.”
Four distinct, physical deviations from any known version of the game. That alone would make the find notable. But a date code discovered inside one of the cartridges pushes the story further. The code places manufacture in late August 1993, two years after the last known printing of the game. Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt was not supposed to be in production at that point.
Two theories have emerged to explain why it was. One holds that the cartridges were produced as replacement stock for warranty repairs and refurbished systems. The other suggests they were manufactured for a bundle that was planned but ultimately never released. Neither has been confirmed, and no documentary evidence has yet settled the question.
PSA 10 Grades, a Historic First, and the Three-Way Split
When the cartridges went to Professional Sports Authenticator for grading, the results made history in their own right. Five of the examined copies received a PSA 10, the organization’s perfect score. That had never happened before with any NES cartridge.
The grade distribution across the remainder was striking in its consistency. Sixty cartridges received a 9.8. Thirty-one came back with a 9.6. One received a 9.4. The condition of the lot as a whole reflects games that spent decades in storage rather than in anyone’s hands.
The first three cartridges go to Goldin Auctions, with prices expected to reach into the thousands of dollars. Ganos and Braun have each kept a number for their private collections. A separate allocation has been set aside for a charity auction, destination unannounced.
Surprise at PSA, and Ganos on the Find’s Place in History
Claire Shelton, head of PSA Video Games, did not hide her reaction when the perfect grades came through.
“We were shocked. 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.’”
Shelton’s framing captures what a PSA 10 represents at scale. It is not just a clean cartridge; it is a cartridge that survived everything and shows no evidence of it.
For Ganos, the physical condition is almost secondary to the historical puzzle the variant represents. Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt is among the most studied games in the NES library. Collectors, historians, and preservationists have catalogued it exhaustively. The fact that 97 copies of a physically distinct version could pass through a precious metal recovery service, sit in a shop’s backlog for six years, and emerge undocumented says something about the limits of even the most careful preservation record.
As Ganos himself wrote when laying out the origin theories, the best explanation anyone can offer is still a guess. Nobody knows for certain why these cartridges were manufactured. That question, for now, remains open.
