A Wisconsin Retro Store Uncovered 97 Unknown NES Mario Cartridges
A Wisconsin retro store discovery uncovered 97 genuine, previously undocumented NES Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt cartridges, including five that received PSA 10 grades.
A Wisconsin retro store has produced the kind of discovery collectors usually assume is no longer possible: 97 pristine copies of a Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt NES cartridge variant that had never been documented before. The cartridges were still in their original wrapping, and the discovery was made by Nintendo Wire’s Jason Ganos at a Wisconsin retro store, turning what looked like an ordinary boxed lot into a previously unknown piece of Nintendo history.
The copies are not merely unusual labels applied to familiar cartridges. They have bilingual back labels, different manufacturing information, and wording in the accompanying manuals that does not match the standard versions collectors already knew about. The cartridges and their internal hardware also carry unusual markings, giving collectors and authenticators several separate reasons to treat the find as a distinct variant rather than a printing mistake.
The most striking physical clue was the box itself. A box marked as containing 100 copies held 97 individually wrapped cartridges, with manufacturing evidence pointing to late 1993, even though the box was dated December 1995. That mismatch does not explain where the cartridges came from, but it does make the lot feel less like a conventional retail shipment and more like something that sat untouched after production.
The copies were subsequently authenticated as genuine by PSA, removing the most obvious alternative explanation for such an improbable find: that someone had assembled convincing reproductions or altered existing cartridges. Their condition was extraordinary as well. Five received PSA 10 grades, reportedly the first perfect 10s PSA had awarded to NES cartridges. The other copies may not carry that particular distinction, but the fact that nearly a hundred survived together in original wrapping is itself the unusual part.
There is a particular kind of historical value in a variant like this. It is not a famous prototype with a well-established story, or a one-off promotional object whose rarity was known from the beginning. These appear to be ordinary game cartridges that were manufactured, packaged, and then effectively disappeared from the record until a retro-store discovery brought them back into view. The bilingual labels, manufacturing codes, manual text, and internal markings are the evidence that lets collectors reconstruct that disappearance.
The late-1993 manufacturing evidence and the December 1995 date on the box leave the final history incomplete. The cartridges were apparently made in the 1990s, but the material available so far does not establish why this particular version existed, why it was packaged in that box, or why so many copies remained together. For now, the important fact is narrower and more compelling: 97 genuine, previously undocumented Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt cartridges survived in remarkable condition, and five of them have now set a perfect PSA benchmark for the NES.