Normally, when watching PBS’s long-running show Antiques Roadshow, I expect to see old items such as pans and chairs from a century ago. So I’ll admit that I felt very old seeing a SNES cartridge for Donkey Kong Country appear on the program’s latest episode.
On March 30, PBS aired the season 30 premiere episode of Antiques Roadshow. As with all past episodes of the show, this one features people bringing various objects in to be looked at by an expert who then offers an approximate value based on the item’s age, condition, and rarity. And during the March 30 episode, a woman brought in not a fancy lamp or old blanket, but instead a slightly scuffed-up SNES Donkey Kong Country cart featuring a Hollywood Video sticker.
According to the woman, this isn’t a normal DK SNES cart. It starts on the first level and lets you play for about five minutes, then stops. She’s had it for over 15 years and explained that after a game collector offered her $1,000 in 2012 for the odd cart, she realized it was probably worth hanging on to. Appraiser Jordan Weiss, after sharing that he played the game growing up, explained that this was a competition cart made for 1995’s Blockbuster Championship and then likely sold via Nintendo Power after the event wrapped up. There are thought to be only around 2,500 DK Country competition carts in existence, and most are in collectors’ hands, making this a fairly rare find.
My favorite moment occurs when the appraiser points out a Hollywood Video sticker like it’s a maker’s mark on some relic from the Civil War. Here’s the transcript:
Weiss: As you can see, this cartridge has Hollywood Video stickers on it.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Uh, which is interesting. And I wasn’t able to find any record of the competitions being done at Hollywood Video. The 1995 competition was a Blockbuster competition. A major competitor, or the major competitor of-of Hollywood Video.
He also asked about the initials signed on the cart, but those turned out to just be from the owner who did that to help her keep track of the cart when it was tossed in with her friend’s games.
According to Weiss, this odd Donkey Kong Country SNES cart could fetch around $2,000 to $4,000 at auction. Welcome to the era in which your favorite games are old enough to need an expert to poke at them when people bring them in on Antiques Roadshow. Time is a cruel bastard.