Missing $10K SNES Package Has Been Found
By Boston Blake 23 February 2017
After losing hope of recovering a valuable package full of SNES games, a game collector who goes by Byuu has announced the SNES package has been found. The package, which is said to carry $10,000 worth of SNES games, was lost last month by the US postal system and considered gone forever.
However, after news sites began to cover the disappearance, employees at the USPS began a nationwide search for the package, eventually finding it in an Atlanta, Georgia mail recovery center. The games, which belong to another collector, had been sent to Byuu as part of a project to scan and archive every SNES game.
When the package was originally lost, Byuu considered the project dead and started collecting donations to repurchase each of the lost games for the original collector. Now that the games have been recovered, Byuu has canceled the donations and refunded those dedicated gamers and fans who had provided funds.
As far as how the discovery happened, Byuu offered a detailed description of how the right amount of media attention spurred a deeper hunt for the games, which eventually helped the USPS find the lost package. Byuu said:
“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.”
It’s fortunate that the games were discovered when they were, considering lost packages only go to the Atlanta recovery center when they’re on their way to public auction.
Unsurprisingly, Byuu said he’ll be more careful when shipping SNES or other important packages in the future.
