An ultra rare – and amazingly still factory-sealed – copy of the NES game Stadium Events has sold on eBay for $35,100, according to a report. The bidding began on January 5th and the price was originally listed as $5,000. The bid ended yesterday at 2PM with sixteen people bidding in total.
The seller, who originally worked for Nintendo for 22 years, says he’s had the game since the 1990s and that the sealed copy of Stadium Events has been verified by the Video Game Authority, a body of verifiers who oversee the authentication of old games.
In a short interview with GameSpot, the seller – who goes by the alias ‘menaceone’ – said he tried to donate the cartridge to Nintendo themselves rather than sell it, but did not feel they would be interested in it.
I collect a lot of different items, so after looking through several boxes I found it! Since I was still working for Nintendo I could not sell this item for profit, which is a smart company policy. When I left in 2012, it was possible for me to sell this game.
Copies of Stadium Events seem to crop up on eBay every so often. Back in 2010, another sealed copy of the game sold for $41,300. Whether or not the game is worth that kind of money is definitely debatable, even if it is a collector’s item, but it’s still pretty shocking that people are willing to pay these kinds of prices for decades old video games.