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There’s no doubt most people reading this have played the original Legend of Zelda. There’s also a good chance you own a physical copy of the game on NES. Your cartridge may be loose, in a sleeve, or in a box if you took extra good care of your games when you were a kid. There’s no doubt someone would pay a decent price for that boxed copy, but not as much as one collector is looking to get.

22-year-old Kiro is in possession of a boxed copy of The Legend of Zelda on the NES. It’s in pretty fantastic shape as well, and has been officially graded. It’s a good thing they got that grading done as well, as it revealed to them just how valuable their copy of the game was.

After putting it up on eBay and almost selling it for $17k, Kiro was clued in that their copy of The Legend of Zelda might be more rare than they first thought. Once a bunch of high-range offers started coming in, Kiro yanked the listing and went through the process of having the game professionally graded. This led to an incredibly discovery.

Kiro learned that their copy of The Legend of Zelda is from the first-print run of the game, making it that much more rare. The last time a first-print run of The Legend of Zelda went up for auction, it brought in a whopping $870k. That’s just a tad different than the $17k that Kiro almost sold it for!

The auction for Kiro’s Legend of Zelda copy has gone live today, and it’s already nearing the $100k mark. If you’d like to keep tabs on this auction to see how high things go, you can watch along here.

[Kotaku]

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Comments (6)

kingbroly

1M ago

Feels a bit scummy, tbh.


ngamer01

1M ago

@kingbroly

Yeah after the Heritage scam, I don't trust professional grades and auctions. We don't retro gaming to be artificially increasing in prices again.


joeshabadoo

1M ago

@ngamer01

The entire manipulated bubble is certainly concerning and upsetting, but a first run copy is a bit different than ‘getting graded for condition’


the_crimson_lure

1M ago

I'm sure this will be sold back and forth between friends several times to artificially inflate the value. Isn't that what wata was doing?


prosscct

1M ago

It's a chicken and the egg question about whether it was Wata or true demand that inflated the game price bubble. For high end collectibles, it often is just a few people with means and interest trading the item back and forth, and because there aren't that many, sometimes they do know each other. I think that the game price bubble it the end will inflate again as time goes on, but it will be fed by surging demand among average gamers themselves. It's not like there are a lot of these in existence. To me, a mint condition Funko Pop is a much bigger scam because there are tens of thousands sometimes of a single character printed and a huge percentage are kept mint in package, so any kind of premium, however small in comparison, is wildly inflated compared to an item that is near 1 of 1 in condition and rarity, and is the germinal entry of a franchise that had massive impact on a medium and pop culture history.


conangiga

1M ago

"officially graded" yeah yeah