The $17,500 NES game

My coworker’s husband just e-mailed me this story because apparently he played the game when he was ten and an aspiring video game world champion. It’s the gold cartridge of the Nintendo World Championships, a 6 minute game consisting of bits from Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and Rad Racer. Some guy bought it a couple weeks ago for the reasonable price of $17,500. Crazy. I didn’t even know it existed before today.

According to the Wikipedia entry only 26 of these exist, so $17,500 sounds about right to me.

Reminds me of an old Racketboy write-up I found on Arstechnica a few years back:

Holy Grails of Console Game Collecting - Part 1
Holy Grails of Console Game Collecting - Part 2

I have 4 or 5 of those 20.

Panzer Dragoon Saga Saturn
Sonic the Hedgehog SMS
Congo Bongo intellivision
Bounty Bob Strikes Back 5200
and I think I have Metal Slug for the Neo Geo.

I wonder if he’ll used canned air instead of spittle to blow in the cartridge.

He’ll throw it in a safe with his grey cartridge and have himself a nice retirement. Too bad I didn’t think of this first.

i played in the NWC

was quite fun, I was very upset since I was 1 short of advancing to the next round. All I got was a hat, tshirt and bunch of medals/ribbons

Nostalgia fanboys are strange.

I remember spending hours training for the Nintendo World Championships. I competed in Cleveland. I had the 50 coins down to a science, but I crashed once on Rad Racer, which deprived me of the ten seconds I needed for one…more…Tetris which would have put me on the main stage. It was a great time – the height of my Nintendo fanboyism.

All I have is Panzer Dragoon Saga Saturn which I never did finish.