Suddenly, a FaceBook IM popped up from my friend Ian, who works at the local game store. "Well my day certainly just got interesting," it read. Being someone just as snarky as myself, I of course assumed that something funny had yet happened again in the video game store Ian worked in. It probably was a 40 year-old man yelling about his like of Pokemon games, or perhaps a customer came in and dropped off a cockroach infested Xbox 360 to repair. Being too lazy to conjure up a witty response at the time, my "Oh?" would have to suffice. Ian didn't respond, and I went about the daily grind... that is until a text message was sent to my cell phone.
Now I'm not a fan of text messaging for a number of reasons I'm not getting into, one of them being the fact that I am secretly 74 years old. So to me, a picture text message is even more useless than the mundane "WHAT R U UP 2" texts I usually get from girls and men pretending to be them. "You cost me 50 cents, Ian!" I said to myself when I saw two picture text alerts magically appear on my phone. I squinted at the first one... it was a green board with a rom stuck right in the middle, sitting against a gray shelf or wall about 6 feet away from the phone's camera. That's pretty cool that someone traded in a prototype game, I thought. I leaned towards it being a Gameboy prototype due to the fact that it appeared square.
Then some thoughts hit me. I don't remember their store having a gray shelf or wall. Is that really a prototype? Is that an object really close up and not far away? Why am I not guilty that I haven't done any work in two hours? And so my thoughts kept cascading, colliding, and congealing into focus: What I was looking at was an object up close, and not at a distance. I re-examined the photo more closely... was that something white on the bottom? Why is the gray shelf/wall ridged? I turned my phone to get a view of the picture from a different angle.
Oh.
OH.
I turned the phone back to its normal orientation and clicked on the second picture text. There it was, clear as day: a gray Nintendo World Championships 1990 cart.
My semi-skeptical heart skipped a beat. I dialed Ian's cell phone.
"You're f*cking with me," I quickly said after Ian answered his phone. Laughing gleefully like a little girl, Ian responded, "No, no dude, it's here. I can't believe it. It just walked through the door." Immediately I could tell that Ian wasn't kidding or pulling a prank. He was slightly out of breath and sounded like he was in partial shock. As much as I want to give Ian credit, unless he was Lawrence Olivier, he wouldn't be able to pull off that caliber of performance. And he wasn't Sir Olivier the last time I checked (and probably wouldn't know who he was for that matter).
"Alright, I'll be down there in about twenty minutes to take a look." It's not like I had done much work that afternoon to begin with, and after this revelation, it's not like I was going to be able to work anymore anyway.
As I strolled in through the store's door a bit later, I saw that Ian was attending to a few customers and acting unassuming. I believe he was ringing up a PS3 game when he first noticed me. I waited in the back of the store and out of the customers' way, and devoted my time to looking at the NES games behind the glass display off to the side. Oh, Dino Riki for 5.99, huh? A couple of agonizing minutes passed as I pretended to stay interested in looking at a display of games where I owned all of them. Finally the customers left, the story was empty, and I approached Ian. Up close I could see that Ian's face was red, and his eyes slightly on fire. Either he had just did a few lines off the nearest copy of Arkham Asylum, or he had just come across the most unique NES cart to ever grace the planet Earth. I decided to break the awkward silence.
"So..."
"So."
"Anything out of the ordinary happen at the store today?"
"Nah. A few trade-ins, sold some DS games, fixed an Xbox. The typical."
"Oh OK, I guess I'll be going then."
"Alright, thanks. I'll talk to you later then."
Ian's giddy smile slowly ate through his nonchalant facade. I waited as patiently as I could without reaching across the counter and strangling him. "Alright, here it is," Ian said as he reached under the counter and placed a Nintendo game in front of me. There it was: a Nintendo World Championships 1990 gray cart, #205. I picked it up with an attitude that was part incredulity, part scholastic, but not as much excitement as I thought I'd have (I'll get to that later). The cart was in pretty good condition, better than most online pictures of others I had seen. The label had no tears/scratches, it was fully intact, and the top label was near perfect and 100% attached to the cart.
Within about four seconds I verified with strong confidence the authenticity of the cart. You had the dip switchs right there (which I moronically thought was a Gameboy prototype), it weighed about three times that of a normal NES cart, and I saw that the label was too imperfect to be a fake. The subtle black glue marks dotted underneath the surface's label were a giveaway as well, and it had what looked like a tiny fleck of a 15 year-old Cheetoh stuck on the label... not easy to duplicate! The NWC fever had hit us. "Oh, it's real, oh baby is it real," I happily stated. We felt like Old West gold miners who had struck it rich. Simultaneously, we laughed like schoolgirls who had just won a lifetime supply of My Little Pony dolls.
I asked Ian how the game came into the store. Here's the short version: A man in his 20's walked into the store with a bag of fifteen or so Genesis and NES games and asked to trade them for store credit and a replacement NES AC Adapter. Ian took a quick glance into the bag and saw some very ordinary Genesis and NES games: Top Gun, Sonic, Double Dribble, etc... nothing that was even worth more than three bucks. "I want to trade in these crappy games," the young man said. YES, HE ACTUALLY SAID THAT. Ian gave the guy a power cord and some store credit, and the man left the store. Several minutes later, Ian took the games out of the bag to catalog them for the store's system. He now looked at each and every title, running his finger past the end label of each NES game in the stack. That's when one particular game stuck out at him... and that's also when he probably started to hyperventilate.
Ian revealed to me that guilt started to set in once he realized that the man had traded the cart in for almost nothing, but I assured him that there was no deception involved on his part so he shouldn't feel like he did anything wrong. I don't think that piece of advice helped his state of mind that much, but that's what I honestly thought.
We discussed that the strangest part of all this was that this occurred shortly after the Stadium Events storm hit, when everyone and their dog was searching and digging out every Nintendo game, display piece, and Nintendo tube-sock that they could find to sell for an easy profit. How could the guy who obviously played NES games not have known that he had something unique? Had he just thought it was a normal game? Did he think it was worthless? Had he never heard of Google? Strange, but who knows? I immediately wanted to know his identity to find out the history of the game, whether it had come from the area, was it a relative's, etc. Being that the identity of the seller was unknown, this seemed (and still seems) unlikely to happen, and Ian had no idea who the person was.
We discussed some possibilities about how the man could have come across the cart for a couple of minutes (flea market? garage sale? NES fairy?), but then our inner children quickly took over: we had to try the game out. As if caring for a new-born, Ian gently cleaned the game's connectors (almost no dirt), and then we tried the game on a system sitting in the back room. The game immediately powered on to life. Again we giggled like 7 year olds who had just met Mickey Mouse and friends for the first time. Ian began playing the Super Mario Bros. portion of the game.
"OK Ian, you have to get fifty coins. Go, go! Hit that block! No, that's not the pipe you go down! You missed those other coins! Have you ever played this game before?!"
"Shut up, Pat!" Ian obviously appreciated my words of encouragement.
A couple of minutes later after we finished playing the game, a thought hit me. Why don't I make an offer on the game? Ian had already informed the store's owner that the game had been traded in, so I knew things might be more complicated/expensive than I would have liked if others made an offer... but I felt this was fate. As I stated before, I was happy the game was right in front of me, but I was not as excited as you would think. It was almost as if I had expected it to happen. For the past six to eight weeks, I had been thinking that an NWC cart would be found in the area... no joke. I cannot explain it, but I had a feeling that one would turn up at a local swap meet or garage sale or dumpster or somewhere. Other incredibly rare items had been found in the area already (M82 Demo Unit, Magical Chase for Turbografx), so to me it was almost as if the area was OVERDUE for an NWC cart. Call me crazy, call me psychic, but that's the truth about what I was feeling/thinking leading up to this event. I told Ian all of this, and he could tell by the crazy look in my eye that I was speaking the truth. Then again, I say almost everything with a crazy look in my eye.
I let Ian know I was prepared to make a serious offer for the game. "Yeah, I actually let him know already that you'd probably be interested in it," he responded. Ian was looking out for me, which I greatly appreciated. The owner was going to stop by later that night at a bar that Ian and I were going out to for drinks, so it was perfect timing... the stars were aligned. What could go wrong? A lot, my paranoid mind thought.
Later that night at a dive-bar, we drank from a pitcher of beer and watched a fight almost break out three feet from us; the perfect environment to discuss video game deals! I spoke to the owner about the history of the game and gave him my offer while Ian and his friends looked on with interest. The owner could see my enthusiasm, and let me know that I would have the rights to a deal first, but he would have to do his research and get back to me. Three sleepless nights, one other offer from a separate party, and one counter-offer and tense discussion later - it was finally over. A price was agreed on, a deal was struck, and I became the owner of arguably the most important video game in Nintendo's history... hell really all of video game history for that matter.
So a little more than ten years after I started collecting NES games, I wrapped up my long journey of visiting countless flea markets, garage sales, game stores, and thrift stores by coming across a Nintendo World Championships cart, seemingly by providence. I had moved some months before, and this to me was just about meant to happen, as if it solidified/supported my decision to pick up and venture across the country. It's not just a rare game now to me, it's a part of the story of my life, and a great one that I'll tell my grandchildren about, should I ever have any. Their grubby little hands will never touch the game, though. It's mine! All mine!