Famicom Super Mario Bros
Image: Damien McFerran / Time Extension

Over the years, it's easy for your childhood games to go missing or to find their way into someone else's hands, but thanks to a Japanese museum called the Named Cassette Museum a collection of gamers are now being reunited with their lost carts after years and even decades apart (Thanks Kotaku!).

Junji Seki, the director of the museum, originally started tracking down the former owners of old video game cartridges as a hobby, after noticing names and other personal information scrawled on pre-owned Famicom carts he'd collected. However, in 2015, he decided to open a museum based on the idea, with the express purpose of reuniting gamers with their lost carts and documenting the story behind them.

To find these owners, the Tokyo-based museum uses a combination of internet searches and public exhibitions. There are also a few conditions in place, should you locate one of your carts in the museum's collection.

As Kotaku writes: Seki must hand over the carts in person, you must buy the cartridge (for a price of your choice), and you need to let the museum document its story online. That all seems fair enough, though, to be reunited with something you'd logically assumed you would never see again. You can visit the museum's website to view some of the lost carts it has in its collection.

If you had the chance, what childhood game would you like to see returned to your collection? Let us know in the comments!

[source bonusstage.net, via kotaku.com]