Erik Voskuil running the wonderful Before Mario (and has wrote an excellent book of the same name), has one of the world’s best collections of Nintendo stuff. Recently though he managed to snag something that was special even by his standards: a couple of packs of 1950s Nintendo playing cards depicting the company’s hometown of Kyoto.
“I can’t stress enough how excited I was to find these seventy-year-old Nintendo cards with Kyoto in the 1950s.” Voskuil wrote excitedly on August 7th. “In all my years of collecting, these are the only specimens I have come across.” To put that in perspective, write in his blog
Having publicly expressed hesitation about opening the packages – these are valuable and if they remainned closed would keep this value—Voskuil eventually decided to open one of them and leave the otheras it allowed him to see how the cards were actually inside while also keeping the second set sealed.
Unfortunately hThe initial excitement didn’t last long.
“However, when I carefully removed some of the packaging, I quickly found that all of the cards were completely fused together.” he writes. “They had remained pressed together for so long, probably in hot and humid conditions, that the ink on all the cards had completely stuck them together. The deck of individual cards had become a solid brick. The photo prints on the cards, which contain a relatively large amount of ink, may also have contributed to this.”
Note that these cards are old, and so lacked any plastic or laminate we would normally associate with playing cards made in recent decades. These were all paper, so when he says they fused together, he means it. This is no longer a card game, but an expensive one pad of paper.
Upon reviewing the second pack, Voskuil noted that these cards had suffered a similar fate, and while some have suggested “putting the packs in the freezer for some time” or “putting them in a ‘sweat box’ that is also made by used by stamp collectors”. he says grimly the “These packs are sadly beyond all of those methods and will remain fused together forever.”
Pity! The only consolation one can find is that even the boxes are beautiful, and that Voskuil got away with one card, though, as one of the two decks had a pattern card attached to the back that could be removed.
You can see more images of the cards and learn more about why they were important below Before Mario.
