Can you imagine finding a game in your collection and thinking ‘I bet this is worth something?’. If you’re a retro gamer, this is something you think about all the time as a default; it’s the reason we head to car boot sales at 6 am and why we covet rare games in our collection with the hope that they might one day act as a deposit for a house.
And, of course, to play them.
But when you’ve got a sealed copy of one of the best NES titles to ever grace the console and the game that kickstarted one of the best series of all time, then you know you’ve got something special in your hands.
A young gamer by the name of Kiro understandably dreamed big and thought that he might be able to get a pretty penny for the game. When I say a pretty penny, Games Radar reported that he hoped he would get around $20,000 for it, though he ended up with a lot more.
You see, this rare Zelda NES game has ended up selling for an incredible price of $288,000. Just take a second to think about being a kid with that much money – I’d be buying everything I set my eyes on!
Renewing Our Faith In The Human Race
Kiro had no idea that he was holding a first production run of the game and how valuable it was, and rather than knowledgeable gamers buying the title and selling it for an enormous profit, they actually let Kiro know what he had in his possession and encouraged him to put the price up.
Heritage Auctions wrote on the official auction page ‘For just the second time in the history of Heritage Auctions, we present a sealed first production copy of The Legend of Zelda for the NES, with the precedent being a Wata 8.0 A copy that prompted a furious bidding war way back in October 2021″
They went on to say that ‘This is the rarest and easily the most highly sought-after variant of the beloved game and may be the last one we see for a long time’
This article has renewed my faith in the human race – I’ve always said that gamers and metalheads are the nicest people on the planet, and that statement (the gaming part at least) has never been more true than in this instance.
These older gamers could easily have kept quiet and made a profit for themselves, but instead, they’ve created a core memory for a young lad and given him some seriously life-changing money.
Kiro’s sale of The Legend Of Zelda might be astronomical in comparison to what he was originally looking for, but when you consider that a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. sold for £1.6 million (over $2 million) it’s still a small amount compared to what games can sell for.
I doubt Kiro will be worried about that right now, however. I would imagine he’s already hitting up thrift stores and Vinted looking for other rare games to invest in as we speak!
