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Super Mario Bros. might be one of the most famous and best-selling video games of all time, but, as recent auctions have shown, copies of it can fetch insane prices if the stars align.
You can imagine, then, why the discovery of 97 copies of a previously unseen variant of the game would cause such a commotion – and that's exactly what happened to Nintendo Wire's Jason Ganos.
As detailed in a lengthy blog post, Ganos was visiting the Wisconsin-based OneStopWonders when its owner explained that he had a box in storage that had made its way to the store via a person whose job it was to extract gold from unwanted circuit boards. After revealing that the box contained NES games, Ganos asked to see it – and made the amazing discovery.
Inside were 97 copies of the Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt cartridge – a common NES title, but not in this condition. All of the carts were pristine with instructions, and the store owner was intending to sell them for around $15 each (the box was supposed to contain 100 carts, but three had gone missing over the years).
After doing some research, Ganos found that the carts were bundled up at the end of 1995, which was a fair few years past what many would consider to be the commercial zenith of the NES. After posting about the discovery online, he was contacted by "two separate directors at two separate grading companies. Both of them almost immediately told me the same thing. Something was strange about these cartridges."
As Ganos explains:
"The back label was unlike anything that had been documented before. Instead of the standard English-only text, it featured multiple languages. The manufacturing codes on both the cartridge and instruction manual also differed, indicating these games were produced in late 1993. Even the manual contained previously undocumented text. Known manuals include the phrase “maintenance or repairs,” while this newly discovered version instead reads “maintenance or service.”"
The production run means these might well be the last Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt carts to ever have been made. But why were they created in the first place? "Why would Nintendo manufacture new pack-in games in late 1993 for a console bundle that was no longer being sold?" asks Ganos.
One answer is that these carts were intended as replacements under warranty and for refurbished NES systems. Another is that they were supposed to go in a bundle that never happened (let's not forget that Nintendo released the New-Style NES in 1993).
Ganos got the carts graded, and five of them received a PSA 10 rating. He says that he and the store owner will be keeping some of them for themselves, but "some of the others will be auctioned off, and others will have charity auctions set up in the very near future."