MELBOURNE: Bidding on a rare NES game listed for auction has reached $100,000, with four days still remaining.
Stadium Events was a game created by Bandai back in 1987, and had an extremely limited number of cartridges printed in the US. It is universally accepted to be the rarest licensed NES title, making it highly sought-after by collectors. It’s estimated that no more than 2,000 copies were ever printed, of which only 200 ever made it into players’ hands.
Nintendo bought the rights to the game and pulled all copies from shelves almost immediately after it was released in the US. The game was rebranded and made to work with their own running pad peripheral, the Power Pad, rather than Bandai’s version, the Family Fun Fitness mat. The 1,800 copies that were pulled are presumed to have been destroyed.
This latest eBay listing is for a sealed, authenticated version of the game, making it rarer still among an already-rare group. The seller says he had previously worked at Nintendo and came into possession of the game in the ’90s.
At the time of writing, the listing has had 83 bids and is currently sitting high atop a bid of $100,050. The game will ship from Black Diamond, Washington with a postage cost of $25.75.
Two years ago, we reported a complete-in-box (but not sealed) copy of the game selling for $17,000 after being found in a thrift store for only $8.
