Nintendo Cartridge Discovery Could Be Worth Thousands
What’s even rarer than an unheard-of video game variant worthy of a perfect PSA grade? How about a box of nearly 100 of them?
Image: psavideogames on Instagram
Kevin Braun, owner of the nostalgic store OneStopWonders in Wisconsin, was planning to sell a box of vintage video game cartridges that had been sitting in storage for years. When he invited Jason Ganos, owner of gaming news site Nintendo Wire, to help him, neither of them expected they would uncover a rare piece of Nintendo history—or the first game cartridges to achieve a PSA 10 grade.
Ganos, who loves the history of video games as much as playing and writing about them, was excited to see the original shipping box, dated 1995, from the Nintendo factory in Japan. It was packed with 97 game cartridges for the Nintendo Entertainment System, each one still sealed in its clear plastic wrapper with the accompanying instruction manual.
At first, the cartridges themselves didn’t seem too exciting. They were for the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combination, a very common dual-game cartridge combining two of Nintendo’s most famous titles. Still, the surprise of finding a box filled with unopened copies was interesting enough for Ganos to post about it on social media.
Responses came quickly, including two from professional grading companies. They urged Ganos to take a closer look at his find, suspecting that, if the cartridges weren’t fakes, they were a variant of the game that no one had seen before. The back label was printed in multiple languages, and the instruction manual had nonstandard text. At the request of one of the grading company directors, Ganos took one of the cartridges apart to check the circuit board.
Convinced that the cartridges were something special, Ganos and Braun contacted PSA, one of the grading companies that had responded to the social media post. The company wanted to grade all the cartridges in the box, a rare offer, and asked for them to be delivered in person, so Ganos immediately booked a flight for the next morning. After returning home, he kept an eye on the PSA website, waiting for the results. It was a lengthy process; after all, there were nearly a hundred cartridges to grade. But after a week, grades for 12 of them were made available, including one that had achieved PSA’s first-ever perfect 10 for a video game.
Speaking to entertainment news site IGN, Claire Shelton, head of PSA Video Games, credited the fact that the games’ wrappings had never been opened for their pristine condition. “We were shocked,” she said. “If these had not been bagged, I feel confident that there would not have been any tens. Those bags did a whole lot of work.”
Ultimately, five of the cartridges were graded 10. The rest received high grades, too, with 60 graded 9.8, 31 achieving 9.6, and the lowest grade belonging to a single cartridge rated 9.4.
Grading doesn’t directly translate to a dollar value, but Shelton believes the cartridges are worth “multiple thousands of dollars, for sure.” Collectors will soon find out, as three of them will be available to bid on at Goldin Auctions starting on August 12. The auction will last for three weeks.
Ganos, who documented the discovery in a story on Nintendo Wire, says that he and Braun intend to auction more of the cartridges for charity. Of course, they each intend to keep some for themselves.
Nostalgic Nintendo games are having a moment among collectors. A 1986 Super Mario Bros. cartridge with a PSA grade of 9.6 sold for $3 million, a record price for any video game, at Heritage Auctions on June 12. It is both the earliest and highest-graded sealed copy of the game. Pokémon, another flagship Nintendo franchise, is close behind, as a group of three Game Boy games, Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow, recently sold together for $2 million in a private transaction. This was the second-highest video game sale of all time.
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