An opened gold cart sold for $100,088, and factory-graded listings like the one above are asking for a milion dollars. The last time one sold for more money than most people see in a year came in an eBay listing back in 2014. If (and that's a big IF) these carts come up for auction, they sell for insane amounts of money.Ī Grey cart will sell on average for around $15,000 to $25,000, but a gold cart. There are only 353 known copies of the grey carts to have been produced based on their serial numbers, and the gold carts were limited to 26. Nintendo World Championship is the rarest and most valuable NES cart ever made. Another 26 carts were made in gold (like the original Zelda), and those were given out as prizes held by Nintendo Power magazine. For the event, Nintendo produced a custom NES cart of the same name, and for the event, 90 grey copies were given to finalists. There wasn't another until 2015, marking the 25th anniversary, but the real money comes from the first NWC. moreīack in 1990, Nintendo held its first World Championships, which was a competition that toured 30 American cities. Not all NES games are worth a ton of cash, but these stand out as the rarest and most sought after, and are now considered some of most expensive NES games ever produced. While most of us probably had a few of these games lying around at one point, the most valuable NES games really start to skyrocket in price when you include the box and the instructions, and even more if the game's never been opened. Random eBay auctions routinely go up with versions of games that were either never opened or are so rare, it doesn't matter if they were opened or not, and collectors outbid one another in a mad dash to finish their collection. These days, some rare NES games are so coveted that they often sell for hundreds, if not thousands (and even hundreds of thousands) of dollars online.

Another thing nobody could have predicted was that any of those amazing little gray cartridges could be worth more than the money people paid for them, but time makes fools of us all.

Back in the mid-1980s, nobody could have imagined that the Nintendo Entertainment System would be able to bring the video game industry out of the funk that came with the market crash, but that's exactly what it did.

Contra nes expensive