Rare Nintendo Games Found In Wisconsin Could Now Be Worth Millions

When the Nintendo Entertainment System arrived in North America in 1985, it did more than launch a console; it helped revive an entire industry that had crashed just two years earlier.

For a generation of kids, that gray box, the orange Zapper and a certain mustachioed plumber were childhood itself. I remember how excited I was to finally get a Nintendo, since my previous home video game experiences had been Pong, then the Atari 2600, and the slightly better Intellivision.

Much of the Nintendo magic came bundled onto a single package. Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt shipped together as one game, packed in with millions of systems and worn out on living-room floors across the country.

Why Those Old Cartridges Can Be Worth a Fortune

You'd think, four decades later, most of those games would be long gone — tossed in landfills, lost in moves or melted down. And most of them are. But every so often, a pristine copy surfaces, and the numbers get dizzying.

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In 2021, a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. sold for a then-record $2 million. That mark didn't last. A later sealed copy went for a staggering $3 million through Heritage Auctions, making it the most expensive video game ever sold. The rarest condition, it turns out, is the one nobody thought to preserve.

A Waukesha Storage Box Full of Surprises

Which brings us to a recent big Nintendo score in Wisconsin, where a box of nearly 100 old Nintendo cartridges was discovered in storage belonging to OneStop Wonders, a retro game shop in downtown Waukesha.

This is a find that could be worth millions of dollars. Store owner Kevin Braun initially figured the copies of Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt were worth maybe $10 to $15 apiece.

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Then collector Jason Ganos took a closer look and realized that the cartridges were printed roughly two years after the last known production run, with different labels, screws, manuals and motherboards.

The wildest part: Nintendo had reportedly sent the games to a metal recovery service to be melted down for gold, but as fate would have it, they were never destroyed.

Once-in-a-Lifetime Grades, Headed to Auction

Because the cartridges sat untouched for decades, some are in flawless shape. In fact,  several earned the first PSA 10 grades ever given to a Nintendo Entertainment System game — a perfect score collectors chase for years.

Three of them auction head this month, and if history is any guide, the final numbers could be life-changing. Not bad for a box of games Nintendo tried to turn into scrap gold. Sometimes the treasure isn't in the melting pot; it's in the storage room nobody cleaned out.