Earlier this month, video game archivist Byuu stated that the USPS lost nearly $10,000 worth of rare Super Nintendo games when his package went missing and actually appeared to be stolen. One week later after the most recent developments, we have a happy ending to this story.
According to Byuu, he was contacted by the USPS Consumer Affairs office after the widespread coverage of his story. With their help, Byuu was able to find his package minutes before it was to be shipped off for public auction.
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.
All's well that ends well
Byuu also returned the Paypal money he received through donations to replace the games, and he stated that with the returned games now secure, his project of scanning, emulating, and cataloging every Super Nintendo game can now continue. Good for him because nobody else is doing it on an official level.
