Collector pays £70,000 for an old NES video game to honour his mum

metro.co.uk wrote:

If you have one of these, you might want to put it on eBay (Picture: Instagram)

After 130 bids, a copy of Castlevania on the NES sold for £70,900, with the winner saying a 23-year search is finally over.

A big reason why retro games still have such a powerful pull today, as seen at the recent London Gaming Market, is because of the nostalgia value of playing something from your childhood on its original format.

Some fans will go through great lengths to get their hands on a piece of their gaming history, although paying £1.44 million for a copy of Super Mario Bros. has more to do with investors artificially inflating prices than anything else.

Another auction for a rare video game took place on eBay recently, where someone paid $90,100 (£70,900) for a copy of 1987 platformer Castlevania on the NES, claiming that it was the first game their mum ever bought them.

The auction attracted 130 bids, to reach the £70,900 selling price, and the listing said the copy is in brand new condition. An image of the game also includes its original price tag, likely from the late 80s, of $27.87 (£22 – or £61 adjusted for inflation).

The winner later uploaded their own image of the game on Instagram, saying:

‘The search is over after 23 years. I resigned to never being able to add this grail after years of searching. But, everything just came together for a childhood friend and I this week as we were able to obtain this absolute beauty.

‘This was the first game my mum ever bought me. I still remember the phone call we made to buy it. It’s a core memory, as is this past week.’

One of the other bidders, who posted an image on Instagram showing their highest bid was $90,000 (£70,900) for the item, said that they thought the game could sell for far more in the future.

‘Congrats to the winner (I know him and he deserved it way more than me). Curious to see the future of this piece. It’s a $250K flip IMO [in my opinion],’ Grailmonster said.

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Although there hasn’t been a new entry for a long time now, Castlevania is not an obscure game or franchise. Although there were apparently less copies made of the first entry than you might expect.

The real reason this auction went so high, though, is that it’s possible to prove this is a first edition, because it has a *hang tag* – to hang it from a hook in a shop instead of just being stacked on a shelf.

Even so, paying that much for such a well-known game seems especially perverse given the series has multiple Japanese-only entries that are genuinely rare and difficult to obtain.

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