A Rare Find: Uncovering Hidden Treasures in a Waukesha Game Shop
Collectors often dream of stumbling upon a hidden treasure, and for video game enthusiast Jason Ganos, that dream became reality in a most unexpected way. While assisting with a pinball machine repair at a local Waukesha game store, Ganos uncovered a remarkable find: a box of old Nintendo games tucked away in a storage unit.
Kevin Braun, the owner of OneStopWonders, had acquired the box from a seller two years prior. The seller claimed the box originally belonged to his grandfather, who ran a metal scrapping business. Curious about the contents, Ganos and Braun decided to explore further.
Inside, they discovered 97 pristine cartridges of Super Mario Brothers Duck Hunt, each carefully wrapped in plastic with accompanying manuals. However, these were not just any cartridges. They were a rare variant, produced in a limited run over thirty years ago and now highly sought after by collectors.
“If you pop the game into a system, it’s the exact same game, but everything else is a little bit different,” Ganos explained. “The motherboard is different, or the system board, the manual has different language in it, and the back of the cart is multilingual, which this game never had before.”
Released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988 and discontinued in 1991, these copies were dated 1993, suggesting a mystery behind their existence. Ganos speculated that Nintendo might have produced these extra copies for warranty repairs, which were ultimately never scrapped for their precious metal content as intended.
Following the discovery, Ganos transported the cartridges to the Professional Sports Authority in Los Angeles for grading. This organization evaluates collectibles on a scale from one to 10, and five of the cartridges achieved a perfect score of 10. “Getting a 10 is almost unheard of. In fact, for NES games, for NES carts, we got the first 10s that ever existed at PSA,” Ganos noted.
The excitement surrounding the discovery has not only brought attention to the shop but also increased its foot traffic. Braun admitted he initially underestimated the value, intending to sell the games for a mere $10 to $15. “I didn’t realize what we had, I thought they were just regular NES games of Mario. I was gonna sell them for $10 to $15,” he said. “It’s unreal, but I’m just taking it day by day.”
The cartridges are slated for an online auction, set to begin Friday and conclude on September 9. Although the final sale price is unpredictable, Ganos remains optimistic given the unique nature of the find. “I’ve said it could go for hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars. It’s all just kind of speculation on what somebody’s willing to pay for it,” he said, adding, “I think what we have going for us is that it’s a new variant, and that it’s a perfect 10, which has never existed before.”
Both Braun and Ganos intend to retain one of the perfectly graded copies, while the shipping box will be displayed in Braun’s store. The likelihood of discovering more variants like these elsewhere is slim, according to Ganos. “Everybody we’ve talked to in the game preservation space that collects, they thought that we’ve had every variant of this game already documented,” he commented. “But here we are, in this tiny little shop in this tiny little town that happens to have a new variant of this.”
