Woman Buys Old Nintendo Game For $7.99. Turns Out It's Worth $15,000

April 17th, 2013, 15:03 Posted By: wraggster

It's the archetypal jackpot story of flea markets, pawn shops and antiques roadshows. Someone pays a few dollars for a long-forgotten box at a swap meet and then discovers they have a five-figure rarity on their hands. That describes a North Carolina woman today, who purchased one of the rarest video games ever sold in the United States for $7.99 at a local Goodwill.

Wilder Hamm, the owner of Save Point Video Games in Charlotte N.C., met this woman this morning when he opened his store. He held the box and saw its contents: Stadium Events.
"Oh my God!" Hamm said he blurted, when she showed him the box. "She knew exactly what she had," Hamm told Kotaku. She showed it to him last, after presenting some common titles like 10-Yard Fight and The Karate Kid, before rolling out Stadium Events like a $15,000 punchline.
It worked.
"Normally in this business, we try not to show our cards," Hamm said. "We're not in the business of ripping people off but, you show that kind of excitement, they start expecting a mountain of money."
She may get it. Stadium Events, one of the first exergaming titles, was only released in a test market in the northern United States in 1987. The next year, Nintendo bought the North American rights to its "Family Fun Fitness" mat, which then became the more well known Power Pad. Anything under the Family Fun Fitness brand was supposed to have been destroyed.
The box Hamm saw most certainly wasn't. It's in great shape, and so is the game's instructions and its cart. The box still had the plastic on it, though it had been slit so that the box top could be opened and the contents verified.
"She knew exactly what she had," said Hamm, who held and inspected the cart himself. "When I asked her what she expected to get, she said she expected $7,000 to $15,000, which is on target."

[h=6]Collector's Item Obliterates Record for Rare Game Sale[/h]
There is a new Holy Grail of Rare Video Games, and it is Stadium Events. The auction on a… Read…

If the plastic had not been cut—if it was truly sealed in the box—Hamm had no idea what it would be worth then. "Our price for the cartridge alone is $2,800, should we have it for any reason." In 2010, a sealed-in-the-box copy of Stadium Events listed on eBay drew a winning bid of $41,300.

http://kotaku.com/holy-grail-of-rare...l-fo-473730982

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