A super rare Nintendo game was being auctioned off on eBay with a high bid of $7,100 as of 1 p.m. Friday. The final price won't be known until the weekend.
The game, an NES Nintendo World Championship, is one of only 116 copies released as part of a special event in 1990,
the BBC reported. The game featured shortened versions of three classic video games – Super Mario, Tetris and Rad Racer.
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The high bids the video game received surprised some considering the condition of the Nintendo game which is missing its original label with a simple "Mario" scribbled in its place. With more than 30 hours remaining on the auction the bids were likely to increase.
"This is quite unfortunate but happened many decades ago," the seller explained in the item's description on
eBay, who added that he had no idea how the game cartridge was damaged.
"It's like finding the rarest Ferrari but with a scratch – you'd still buy it," Chris Scullion, games editor for Computer and Video Games, told BBC. "They are considered the holy grail among Nintendo collectors."
According to the BBC, a copy in better condition sold at a charity auction in 2011 for $11,000.
As rare and apparently valuable as the game cartridge is, still rarer are the golden encased Legend of Zelda games, 26 of which were given away as prizes in a competition by
Nintendo Power magazine, Wired.com reported.
One of the men responsible for the development of classic video games was former
Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who died this past October at the age of 85.
Yamauchi led Nintendo from 1949 to 2002, engineering its global growth and developing the early family computer consoles and Game Boys,
according to the Associated Press.
Nintendo, founded in 1889 by Yamauchi's grandfather, started out as a playing cards company and transformed under Yamauchi’s leadership to create the immensely popular Super Mario Bros. and Pokémon games. In the 2000s, Nintendo innovated with the Wii gaming system.
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