About a hundred cartridges of an unreleased Super Mario Bros. discovered - the story of a phantom edition

About a hundred cartridges of an unreleased version of Super Mario Bros. have been found. This is not a prototype: it's a produced edition that was never distributed, resurfacing decades after its manufacture.

The memory of a cassette we never saw

We all have a story with Super Mario Bros. For the NES/Famicom generation, it's often the first cartridge held in our hands, the first world completed, the first "ta daaaa" of the end credits. But there are versions of Super Mario Bros. that no one, or almost no one, has ever held. Editions that were produced, packaged, and yet never reached the player.

This discovery reveals precisely that: around a hundred cartridges of an unreleased edition of Super Mario Bros. have been found. Not prototypes, not ROM hacks, not Southeast Asian bootlegs—authentic cartridges from an official production that, for reasons yet to be documented, never made it to store shelves.

The ghost edition: what we know

Numerama’s article does not specify the exact geographic origin of this version or the platform (NES, Famicom, or a regional variation), but the discovery of "around a hundred" units in a single batch suggests a real commercial production, not an isolated developer’s drawer sample.

In video game history, such situations happen more often than one might think:

• A game produced for a regional market that never opened
• A promotional edition tied to a failed commercial partnership
• A clearance lot from a retailer that sank without selling its stock

In all these cases, the cartridges exist, but they remained in warehouses or dormant stocks for decades before resurfacing.

What it says about video game preservation

The discovery of these cartridges raises the classic question that the preservation industry constantly faces: how many editions, variants, and regional versions of iconic games remain unknown, stored somewhere in a warehouse or forgotten distributor?

For Super Mario Bros. specifically, the catalog is better documented than most NES titles thanks to the game’s ubiquity and collector attention. But every new discovery reminds us that even the most studied games have blind spots.

Organizations like the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) work to systematize preservation: cataloging, ROM dumps, physical archiving. Every batch of unreleased cartridges that emerges is an opportunity—provided it is dumped and documented before disappearing into private collections.

Verdict for the community

These cartridges deserve to be dumped and cataloged above all else. Their historical significance far outweighs the market value of a rare cartridge—even if the latter will undoubtedly be high in collectors’ circles.

For us, it’s a reminder that the history of video games continues to be written, forty years after Super Mario Bros. was released in Japan (July 13, 1985 on Famicom—the console itself launched in 1983, but the game followed in 1985—and September 13, 1985 in the West on NES).