Retro Geek: I Found A Boxed Nintendo In The Garbage

Did I just ride through a time portal and it’s 1985 because someone left a near-mint NES console in the original Nintendo box out on garbage day. It had to be time portal located in a posh Toronto neighborhood or someone finally got around to cleaning out their basement.

I spotted the near mint Nintendo box from a distance and it looked like it was in such good condition that it would make a great piece of retro  home decor – presuming it wasn’t soggy or marked up. Keeping an eye out for The Doctor, I stopped my Dahon and picked up what I expected to be an empty box up.

Great, it wasn’t empty!

This could be a huge urban treasure.

Opting not to waste much time, I peeked inside and saw original NES packaging. Years of video gaming taught me exactly what to do when coming across any kind of treasure – head immediately to your safe house.

My head was swimming with thoughts. Were the Nintendo gods rewarding me for rescuing a Princess Peach? Was this an elaborate comedic television setup? Maybe I really did ride through a time portal and the NES console was left out for trash because the family just got a Super Nintendo.

Back at a safehouse, we unboxed the unit. Everything looked near mint. The NES looked barely used and had little to no dust. However, I wanted to wait until returning home before seeing if the system that reignited gaming would work. The last thing I wanted was a working NES with nothing to play and no time to play it.

Unpacking it the next day I continued to marvel at how well preserved this NES system was. Everything screamed it had to work. If it didn’t work, why wasn’t it thrown away when it broke a decade or two earlier?

Closer examination revealed there was cartridge lodged in the toaster style front loader. Would I be able to get the game out after all these years and more importantly what was the last game played on this unit?

Contra!

Visions of playing Contra swooshed through my head while I hurriedly plugged in the system to my dual core plasma television. I  doubled checked all the cords and the moment of truth beckoned.

Hitting the power button… red ring of death. Well in this case it was NES console blinking red light of death.

In the coming weeks, I’ll watch some videos about how to repair an NES console. Who knows, maybe we can get this classic console up and working like new, despite my lack of screwdriver talent. It’s a beautiful system and would be great to write GCE Retro Thursday reviews on.

If nothing else, this was an incredible urban treasure find; one that’s not likely to happen again any time soon.