Auction Opens for 97 Rare Nintendo Cartridges, Including 5 Perfect 10s

Q: What happened to the three missing cartridges from this legendary 100-count box of unreleased Nintendo variants?

They have not been definitively accounted for. The box was labeled for 100 cartridges, but only 97 were found, and no reporting identifies where the other three went. The most credible explanation from the available coverage is that the three were lost, removed, or separated at some point during the box’s decades-long chain of custody. The cartridges were supposedly destined for metal recovery, then sat in a garage for 20 to 30 years before being sold to Kevin Braun and later forgotten in storage. In that span, the missing units could have been taken out, sold off, discarded, or otherwise misplaced. Jason Ganos and other accounts explicitly note that there is “no telling” where the other three copies went. No evidence in the reporting suggests they were destroyed, authenticated elsewhere, or already surfaced on the collector market. The only documented outcome is that 97 remained in the box when it was finally opened. So the answer is simple: the three missing cartridges’ fate is unknown, and they appear to have disappeared sometime before Braun and Ganos uncovered the cache.

3 articles · Updated · WPR · Aug 14

Ninety-seven untouched 1993 Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridges found in a Waukesha storage box are now up for online auction through Sept. 9, with five graded a perfect 10.
PSA said those five are the first NES cartridges it has ever awarded a 10, a result driven by factory-sealed condition and a previously undocumented multilingual variant produced after the game’s 1991 discontinuation.
Jason Ganos believes Nintendo made about 100 copies for warranty repairs, then sent them to a Wisconsin precious-metals recovery stream, where they escaped being scrapped for trace gold.
Kevin Braun, who bought the box from a seller tied to a scrap business, said he initially thought the games were ordinary $10-to-$15 cartridges; the find is now drawing more visitors to his downtown Waukesha shop.