97 Sealed Copies of an Unreleased Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt Variant Found in a Wisconsin Warehouse

A vintage collectibles shop in Waukesha, Wisconsin has turned up 97 sealed, individually-wrapped NES cartridges of Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt — and they appear to be a previously unknown variant of the game that has never been documented by collectors.

Jason Ganos, owner of Nintendo fan site NintendoWire, was helping local shop owner Kevin Braun sell old game stock when Braun revealed a rectangular box that had been sitting in his storage unit for six years. The box carried stickers with both English and Japanese text, a shipping date of December 1, 1995, and a label reading "100 pcs of Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt." Inside were 97 individually-wrapped copies — three are unaccounted for. Ganos initially assumed the find was unremarkable, since Duck Hunt was one of the most widely distributed NES pack-in games ever made, but after posting photos to a collector Facebook group he quickly realized something was wrong. A director at one of the world's largest grading companies and a director at PSA Games both independently told him the carts looked suspicious — and not in a fake way. "These are either fake, or these are brand-new, never-before-seen variants of these games," they told Ganos. The differences are significant: the back label is different, the manual contains different language and different dates, and the motherboard itself is a completely different revision from any previously known version.

The backstory behind how the box ended up in a Wisconsin antique shop is almost as strange as the discovery itself. According to Braun, a seller brought the box in six years ago, claiming the cartridges had belonged to his grandfather, who worked for a precious metal recovery service. The story goes that Nintendo wanted to offload old stock quickly and sold the cartridges to the service at a low price so the gold could be extracted from the circuit boards — a practice that was common for obsolete electronics. By December 1995, the NES was deep into the twilight of its commercial life in North America, which makes the existence of a late-run, apparently unreleased variant all the more puzzling. Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt was the iconic dual-game cartridge bundled with the original NES Action Set, and it remains one of the most recognizable pieces of gaming history — which is exactly why an undocumented revision carries such weight for the collector community.

Ganos deleted his original Facebook post quickly once the significance of the find became clear, and the carts are now under serious scrutiny from grading experts. If authenticated, this would be one of the most significant NES discoveries in years — a sealed, warehouse-fresh batch of a variant that nobody knew existed.