Rare Nintendo game sold for R403 736

Nintendo nostalgia is at an all time high as a rare NES game sold for US$35 100 (approximately R403 736).

Titled “Factory sealed 1987 Nintendo NES Stadium Events”, the 72-pin design cartridge comes directly from Nintendo’s factory floor where the seller worked for 22 years.

So why sell now? In an interview with GameStop, “menaceone” said it was a previous sale of the same game that made him realise the value of what he had in his possession. Back in January 2011 a sealed Stadium Events game went for US$22 800 (approximately R263 222) making “menaceone” take note.

“I told my wife ‘I know I have that game.’ I collect a lot of different items, so after looking through several boxes I found it!” But he couldn’t sell the game right away. Still working at Nintendo at the time, company policy restricted employees from trading games. Now that he’s no longer with the company, he decided the time was right to sell.

According to the seller’s eBay post, this particular game is one of the rarest licensed NES games available. The fact that the cartridge is still sealed has made it an even more attractive bid for game collectors.

In the run up to the final bid, Wired predicted that the entire bidding process would be trolled due to the media hype created around it. Despite this, GameStop noted bids reached close to $100,000 last night before falling back to lower levels. This suggests that eBay anticipated fraudulent bids and restricted bidding to pre-approved buyers after bids started reaching unusually high levels.

Bidding started at US$5 000 on 5 January, and after 80 individual bids, the race to the finish came to a halt at 5am CAT this morning. All that’s known about the bidder is that he’s made a total of 105 bids on video games over the last month. Clearly he’s a fan.

Image: menaceone/eBay