A Long-Forgotten Super Mario Bros. Cartridge Just Earned a Grade No NES Game Has Ever Received
Many long-lost items have been discovered in the most unexpected places and a rare find in a box of Nintendo cartridges in a Wisconsin retro game store has become one of the biggest video game discoveries in decades. When it comes to video game collecting, Super Mario Bros. is one of the most sought after title thanks to its many variants. Now a newly discovered version is heading to auction at Golding and it brings with it an unheard of perfect PSA 10 grading. The flawless grade is a first for a NES cartridge, made even more impressive when considering the cartridge itself was discovered among almost 100 other cartridges in a box that should have been destroyed years ago. The item is attracting plenty of bids even though the auction does not end until September 10, with 35 bids and a $1100 price tag at the time of writing. That price has been creeping up every few hours, so will not be staying around that level for long.
This particular cartridge is one of 97 discovered in a box held for years in a store in Wisconsin. The box, which was marked as containing 100 Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridges but turned out to be three light, was originally in the possession of the shop owner’s grandfather, who was contracted by Nintendo to extract gold from old cartridge circuit boards before they were destroyed. However, this particular haul had not made it as far as being taken apart, with the cartridges and their manuals all sealed in individual clear plastic baggies. On closer inspection, it was discovered these perfect cartridges contained even more surprises, as the back label included multiple languages (others only include English), and the instruction manuals with them seemed to be from no known sets ever released. It is believed that these cartridges come from the very last production run.
This Could Be the Ultimate Nintendo Cartridge Find
The only thing guaranteed to cause a stir among collectors more than a rare item, is a previously unknown variant of it. Super Mario Bros. cartridges in their original box, with high 9.5 to 9.8 gradings, have recently sold for hundreds of thousands, with one notable set drawing a $3 million winning bid. This cartridge is different, as it is not a boxed version bought in a store almost 40 years ago, but could be something even rarer. The combination of the story behind their discovery and the seemingly unique nature of the item, even before adding in that never-before-seen PSA 10 grading, makes this one of the biggest Nintendo items to come to auction in a long time. Whoever makes the winning bid on this cartridge and manual combo will buy the bragging rights to owning the highest graded NES cartridge in existence, which is sure to add a number of zeroes to the final hammer price.
The timing of the auction could also not be better to help push up the price on this cartridge when it really gets moving next month. The demand for Mario’s earliest games has been at an all-time high in recent years, as proven by the $3 million sale and several others, means that this Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge could find itself a place in retro gaming history. Of course, this is one of 97 cartridge/manual combos discovered and graded. The same auction also features two other cartridges from the fine, one graded 9.8 and the other 9.6, which are currently bidding at less than a fifth of the price of perfect graded one. It is likely that these will just be the first of many more of these long-lost cartridges finally finding their way into private collections.
