"Many have therefore believed it to be a joke... so that Emmett had to publish the images of video surveilance of his home, on which we see him calling the police to prove his good faith. According to the police, this is synthetic heroine estimated at least $10,000."

Didn't you or your brother say that one of the PAL games were probably French? That's probably why we're seeing this in the French news, having the US investigate this must've sparked their interest? lol

 

Thanks! We didn't think to check until after the police had it but, reviewing the raw footage, we're pretty sure that the product code on the label ends with "-FRA." We mentioned it a few places but I don't think that detail ended up in any news reports.

The "PAL B" part is certain though. "PAL B" means it's definitely not UK, right?

It'd be cool if somehow this closes the book on some long 30-something year French/US smuggling investigation. hahaha

CZroe, did you ever weigh the baggies by themselves? That would yield a good indication of actual street value, assuming the brownstone was pure.
 

At this point late in the game, many PAL A and PAL B carts get mixed up all over Europe. My Mario 3-in-1 is NES is NES-ZZ-FRA and I bought it from a UK dealer.


Anyway PAL-A and B territories get mixed up a lot so France may not be the source of origin. Speaking of which, NES-ZZ-FRA still isn't in the database...

 

Right, but it's reasonable to say that it's probably European and not UK/EU/AU, Southeast Asia, Africa, etc as one of the article insinuated.   Having the board mixed up with another PAL title tells us that it definitely crossed international borders with this stuff inside and isn’t just some local guy who lost his secret stash!

All the weighing was done in the video. I estimate the baggies to be about 115 grams since Rollergames without the packets would have weighed even less than the original with the broken board.

What a story. I read it on Kotaku first... we've got a local celebrity!!

Jimmy Fallon seems to think it was just weed inside our Nintendo game cartridges. His joke related it to 4/20 day.




If it doesn't go to the right spot in the video, skip to 3 minutes 10 seconds.

Mr Brownstone in an NES cart. Classy!




Enjoy. hope this lightened the mood a it...  

So... you reached out to Pat and he didn't get back to you? They talked about it on this week's podcast. Shame they didn't get the story from you personally. Figured I'd give you a heads up. About an hour and a half into the episode.

Sorry to hear about the Kotaku thing.

Well, Pat did finally respond to a comment a couple days ago to say that it would be in the next podcast. I responded that I was available to answer questions but I think they had already recorded it.

The initial comment was on a video that sounded like they would mention it (“craziest collector finds” or something). I just mentioned that the title made me think I’d hear something about this.

They seem to think that the video from a week later was the first video so they don’t realize that we were sharing it here and on Facebook/YouTube as we discovered it. Oh well. Minor detail.  

Also, the person who tweeted at Ian to ask if Luna Games has had a run on NES Golf was Ichinisan.   

Just about every report got something a bit off so I’m not stressing it.  
 

Ashamed pat didn't invite you to phone in and talk about the incident live during the podcast. It would have been easy to do. Just set up a time when both of you would be available, call in at the appointed time while recording and feature you on the show.

It seems nobody has bothered to interview you (besides the cops) directly about this incident. Good journalism actually finds the source, not just report what's already been reported. Then you have the "phone call" game where each news agency puts their own "spin" on it until the facts presented in the wild are so far off base there is little truth left.

It has been proven time and again when reputable journalistic outlets accidentally report news from fake news sites. Some of them are ludicrus...

Well, Ichinisan did talk to the guys at some SportsCast podcast after I responded to a tweet I couldn't even read.  





Also, to get it started we emailed the video link to Kotaku's Luke Plunkett and he did ask these questions in his first reply:
"Is there anything else you're able to tell us about the incident? Like: Who exactly did you buy it from? How much did you pay for the games?" We didn’t reach out to anyone else before it went viral.

His only other question before it went live was "did they indicate what the drugs were?" but I didn't get to respond to that until after it went live.

He didn't do so bad. I can see where other reports like NintendoLife got the idea that we didn't know until we got home, but Kotaku didn't actually say that. They initially linked the wrong YouTube channel ("CZroe") but they fixed that. There were a couple issues though.

Luke implies that Newnan PD investigated the flea market when, in fact, that would be Carrollton or Carroll County's jurisdiction. Furthermore, there is no sign that anyone has been there to check out the vendor... except the random people who saw this and are now combing his shelves for NES Golf.   Maybe the police have visited him and he was told not to tell anyone much like I was told at first, but that means Kotaku shouldn't know about it either.

My biggest issue is where he claims that "it was clear that it wasn't a fresh transaction." There is literally nothing to indicate that it wasn't intercepted and stolen off someone's porch the day before. This caused a lot of other articles to make similar statements with some out-right saying that it's been in there since the '80s. Uhh, PAL Isolated Warrior and PAL Rollergames we're both released in 1991.  

One of the officers did say "who knows how long that's been in there" but it wasn't as if to say that it had "clearly" been in there a long time. It was just acknowledging the possibility that it's been i there a long time. Even then, "a long time" could mean since Silk Road/Bitcoin exchanges started several years ago or it could mean 25 years ago. Kotaku implied that seemingly to support the facetious scenario they added to the end (a joke). I guess that's not too different from Jimmy Fallon changing the contents to "weed" in order to make a 4:20 joke on 4-20, but most other places reporting on it took that idea and ran with it.

Despite their reputation and the fact that they never contacted us, NY Post seems to have the most accurate report of all. They actually watched ALL of the videos themselves, disregarded anything added by other news reports, independently obtained the police report, and only added information from the police report (police description of the substance inside). I didn't notice any assumptions, wild conjecture, distortions, or editorialization.

I consider it a good thing that they never contacted us, since I can point to their independent research as confirmation for any of the doubters. They actually watched the full police visit video and relied on quotes from the officer where they call it "drugs" instead of taking my word for it. They relied heavily on quotes, correctly attributing the identification of "heroin" to the "anonymous experts" I attributed it to. They did not imply that it was old or that we weren't expecting to find something like that inside. No wild assumptions about where it came from or how it happened.

So many other articles and YouTube commentaries create contradictions by implying things that we never said. So many times we've found someone screaming "fake!" with their only evidence being a contradiction that was manufactured by someone else's report.

Tipster, for example, read NintendoLife's aritcle and added his own explanations of collector behavior, but somehow managed to make it worse (NintendoLife's story was already pretty inaccurate)! He suggested that we were probably "just getting started" with NES collecting and said we bought the games because we didn't own them, even though his own video clearly shows that we already owned both! He then said we opened them "to verify the boards." Sure enough, someone called it "fake" since that would be a huge coincidence to buy both games just because we didn't own them and find drugs inside both.

Of course the very premise of that is wrong. It wasn't a coincidence when we knew full well that there would be something interesting inside before we bought them and we only bought them to satisfy our curiosity. While talking about how collectors routinely open NES games to verify boards, he proudly displays Mighty Final Fight, a game even I don't own yet (Psst! Tipster! I'll trade ya DuckTales 2...). Of all people, I'd expect a Mighty Final Fight owner who knows about verifying NES boards to know that it wouldn't make sense to open NES Golf for that reason. Looking for a Famicom adapter? Sure. "Verifying" a $0.50 game to avoid counterfeits? No way!

You almost can't help ending up with 10x copies of Golf if you collect NES. It is the most worthless game and seems to come with every bundle. I have a ton of copies because of my "any NES game is worth $1; even just for the shell" mantra, which means I got most of them for less than $1.  

The only thing close to "an interview" was the SportsCast podcast.

While Jeremy Roth from CNN did contact us for permission to use the video in his report, he didn't ask any questions. He report was passed on to multiple local news programs across the country and they all said what he wrote almost verbatim, like one of those John Oliver bits (guess it isn't just conservative news that does this, John  ). The only major error there was when he says "Newnan police...said it appeared the packages had been inside the games a very long time." Unless they contacted the police themselves (which they don't claim to have done), the police never said that. Because they cite the NY Post for some of what was said by the police I do not believe that CNN contacted Newnan PD themselves.

SyFy Wire asked if we could answer some questions but published before I responded. Actually, it seems my original response was lost and they couldn't wait forever. Regardless, they did get any answers from us before publishing.

This feels a bit like the Retro Roundtable "reviewing reviews" of the Analogue Super Nt.  

Haha nice. Ironic that the one podcast that did diligent research and attempt to contact you wasn't even videogame centric. Kudos...  

Do what was it?

So*

I’m guessing we’ll never know for sure.  There’s probably no real case to be had and though they could have had it analyzed, if there was no real reason that would lead to a conviction of of a drug dealer/smuggler, then it might have just been entered as evidence.  If so, it’s likely sitting in storage waiting for a similar event to take place so they can pull out the evidence and compare notes on incidences.
 

Sounds about right. I learned all about that by playing the police quest series on DOS. Real hands on education

But all joking aside, you're absolutely correct. What's interesting is that a lot of these things usually don't travel very far. Like I'm sure that wherever the actual destination it was traveling to, probably wasn't too far off from where it ended up. Like who knows, maybe it got lost in translation. I'm unsure about like drug trafficking but I know that certain prototypes have popped up in places (thrift stores, yard sales, goodwill) that aren't far off from company headquarters or homes from people that worked for those companies

I meant to reply directly to you but forgot to hit the reply button and just made a comment

Those carts were used specifically to smuggle drugs into the country. The dealers probably exchanged the carts back and forth several times, and there are likely more out there. One of them was PAL which screamed overseas operation. Who knows how the carts ended at the thrift shop. If one of the dealers was incarcerated or killed, it is likely his/her belongings were auctioned off or given to family who then sold / donated it not knowing what they had.

And you can bet the police will dust the baggies for prints (which CZroe potentially destroyed) and test the substance with a cheap field test kit. You don't need expensive gas chromatology to determine crack, heroine, opiates, speed, bath salts, pot, whatever. Each class of drugs have telltale signatures. Regardless the investigation becomes internal after evidence is collected. If the guys with the hot games are still at large, they likely know about the news story, but they don't know and will not know whatever the investigation reveals about them. And we won't know either. I think the synthetic heroine claim has merit. They probably call it "mr brownstone" for a reason, to quote guns and roses.

Or maybe it was just a fat kid was smuggling brown sugar when he left for fat camp. No harm no foul. Maybe I should start bating cheap nes carts with little baggies full of brown sugar for future gamers to discover? I swear the crystalline stuff in those baggies looks just like the "Sugar in the Raw" branded unrefined cane sugar I put on my oatmeal in the mornings...  

= = = = = = = =
Back on point, ex employees or family members selling prototypes at an estate / garage sale / thrift shop is apples and oranges to international smuggler operations. If an ex employee retired and stayed in redmond, wa or the surrounding suburbs, then his or her loot will likely turn up in a similar geographical area.

 

You’re an educated man. I went to school for medical and am a lab technologist. You’re 100% correct. Police and any sort government related kinda job, don’t use the more expensive tests. I mean it’s obvious based on the carts tha it’s an overseas job. I mean realistically, unless they’re Nintendo enthusiasts, why send them in pal carts unless they have damn good style lol. I agree with everything you’re saying though and I think it’s actually an interesting idea in the sense of “who would think there’s something in there” in the terms of sending it in nes carts. It’s actually pretty fucking creative when you take yourself outside of the community mindset. Then again, maybe he’s a Nintendo enthusiast?

Yeah. I mean, there’s a good chance that it was porch-pirated from a local over the week only to show up at the flea market that weekend. Could even have been misdelivered to someone who had no scruples about selling it off. I got lucky when I had recently had a misdelivered package of my own that went to [streetname] Court instead of [streetname] Drive (some nice Grandma drove across town to bring it to me). Chances are that it didn’t spend decades in there, despite some of the speculation.  
  Since NES and Famicom carts have been found as mail mules in smuggling operations several times now, I assume it’s pretty common for smuggling. Probably very common on some dark web/crypto marketplaces like Silk Road and its successors.