A super-rare Nintendo World Championships NES cartridge is about to be put up for auction at $10,000, and it's apparently the first of its kind to be publicly sold in ten years.
If you know your onions when it comes to rare games, you'll almost certainly have heard of Nintendo World Championships. The original event was held in 1990, and a special commemorative cartridge was made available to finalists as part of that event.
An extremely limited number of those cartridges - twenty-six, to be exact - were given out as prizes by Nintendo Power, and it's one of those gold cartridges that's going up for auction later today. The whole affair was a big part of the inspiration behind this year's Switch game Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition.
The auction is being held over on auction site Goldin (thanks, Pat the NES Punk), and the starting bid is $10,000, although given how rare these cartridges are, the final sale will almost certainly be for more than that.
One interesting thing about this particular cartridge is that it's missing its label; the Nintendo World Championships cartridges all had a triangular label with the event's logo on it, but that label is absent here.
Whether or not that affects the final sale amount remains to be seen. After all, the cartridge is still exceedingly rare; as Goldin itself points out, only thirteen of the original 26 gold cartridges remain in existence at last count, and Pat the NES Punk says this is the first time one of these cartridges has been on public sale in a decade.
Per price tracking platform Price Charting, the last known public sale for a Nintendo World Championships cart was in 2015, when an eBay listing sold for a whopping $26,677. With that in mind, $10,000 seems a relatively low starting bid, doesn't it?
Thankfully, none of the companies involved in the explosive price-fixing scandal of a few years ago are participating in this auction, and although that doesn't guarantee a lack of skulduggery, it does at least make it less likely for those who are paying through the nose for a collector's item like this.
In any case, the Goldin auction for this super-rare Nintendo World Championships cartridge begins at 8pm Eastern (that's 5pm Pacific) tonight. If you've got the cash lying around, you could even bid for it if you want!
