There is some good news about the lost $10,000 worth of SNES games heading for archival we reported last week as its whereabouts have finally been located. The cache of SNES games was part of a vintage collection from a person in Frankfurt, Germany who lent it to SNES game archiver and emulator maker Byuu for archival purposes. The package was somehow lost along the way and the $10,000 worth of SNES games failed to reach its intended New Jersey destination, save for a few pieces of scrap from the packaging and a letter of apology from the United States Postal Service stating that a “machine error” damaged the shipping box.
Continued media attention and pressure from users online eventually got to USPS and a manager at the USPS consumer affairs department took on solving the case personally and eventually located the cache in at Atlanta Recovery centre, where lost and unclaimed parcel items through the mail are usually auctioned off to the public. Recapping how it all transpired in Byuu’s own words:
“Both before and after February 14th, news sites had started to pick up this story. For which I am extremely grateful. It wasn’t until the story really started to take off that on February 16th, finally a manager at the USPS Consumer Affairs department took note of the case. And I mean that literally: he told me straight up the reason he was contacting me was because of the news articles he had encountered on this case. So thanks to the coverage, I finally had a strong contact within the USPS who passed me to his employee who then proceeded to open an investigation and help search for the package.
On February 21st, I received an e-mail on the missing mail search I had submitted on January 30th, informing me that my package had been located! Excited, I contacted my CA rep… who then proceeded to tell me that the search had failed, and that the e-mail notification was errant. However, she promised to request all possible locations the package could have ended up at to do one last search.
The CA rep called me late in the day advising that someone in the Atlanta, GA mail recovery centre had just now located my package! Thankfully, the photographs I took of the packages before sending back the first batch of 100 games proved useful with exact appearance, dimensions, weight, etc being available for the search team. Still, given all the constant ups and downs, I wanted to wait until the package was in hand before giving anyone any false hope.
Finally, today, February 23rd, the ordeal is finally over! The package arrived safely, with all games intact.”
During the search, Byuu was urged by fans to start a crowd funding campaign to keep the project going, but since the package has been found, he no longer has need for it and has returned all of this money to the donors.
