Starting tonight, Goldin is auctioning off one of the rarest Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges of all time. Nintendo originally created just 26 of these golden cartridges as prizes for Nintendo Power magazine readers in 1990. They are so hard to find that one sold on eBay for $100,088 ten years ago.
Hundreds of cartridges were made for the 1990 Nintendo World Championships, an event that toured the United States to find the best gamers in the country. Players competed for the highest scores in timed versions of Super Mario Bros., TetrisAnd Awesome racer, all of which came on special cartridges with physical switches that allowed the games’ time limits to be adjusted.
Most of these cartridges had standard gray NES cases, but 26 of them were upgraded with a shiny gold case and were given away to winners of Nintendo Power magazine “Player’s Poll Contest” that same year.
These games were never sold in a box, which partly explains why this particular cartridge, which looks worn and is missing its label, only received a 4.0 from CGC Grading. (A grade of 10 would indicate mint condition.)
Despite the cartridge’s crude form, bidding will begin tonight at $10,000. According to the FAQ page on the auction house’s website, potential buyers at that level will be pre-screened to ensure they can pay. That will help protect the cartridge’s unknown seller, but what about buyers?
Counterfeiting a rare cartridge like this and fooling CGC grading would be a huge but profitable undertaking given the current demand for rare retro games and hardware. The easiest way to confirm that it’s legit would be to win the auction and put it in a real NES, but that would be a budget-busting approach best left to deep-pocketed collectors.