“When Jason Ganos was asked to help sell an old box full of NES cartridges…” How 97 Copies of an Unreleased Version of Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt Were Discovered in a Wisconsin Warehouse.
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Comments 2
One of the perfectly graded copies has a current top bid of $1500. A PSA 9.6 copy of The Legend of Zelda is going for $22K+.
Karl Jobst, who's been highly critical of the video game auction market lately, just put out a video about this. I think he belabors the point, but TLDR, these supposedly rare cartridges aren't rare, or even remarkable, and there's no way anyone should be paying thousands of dollars for them. The most interesting thing about them is that they were manufactured and shipped in the mid-90s, well past the NES's tenure. But late (newer) carts are far less valuable than earlier (older) ones, and these carts aren't even the coveted "new in box" variety. They're "loose", albeit well preserved in a shipping carton. Jobst's theory is that the grading company itself is using this rather unremarkable find as an opportunity to pay local news for publicity.
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