If you grew up playing video games, you’ll understand something that modern day kids with their newfangled graphics and gameplay streaming antics don’t get – the power of nostalgia! Nostalgia is what makes us dig up landfills full of buried cartridges, and waste hours of our lives watching old videos of NES start-up screens. It’s why we still want to play the classics, so we can remember the good times, when being able to navigate an entirely different world through your TV screen still seemed like magic. It’s no wonder that rare old retro games can still sell for a pretty penny, although most often they’re snapped up by collectors who want them for their rarity rather than to add lovingly to their own game collection. Because, while nostalgia can be a powerful emotion, we mere mortals couldn’t even contemplate dropping around $10k on a mere video game. Yet that’s exactly what the owner of a rare, factory sealed copy of NES game Stadium Events can (at the time of this writing) expect to bring in from the eBay auction that’s currently in progress.

So just what is Stadium Events and why is it worth so much darn moolah, anyway?

Stadium Events was released in 1987 by Bandai for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES, aka Famicom in Japan). The game is basically a sporting sim featuring several track and field events (hurdling, long jump, triple jump, sprinting, etc). According to its Wikipedia page, the NTSC version of the game is officially the rarest licensed NES game ever available for purchase in North America, with a limited print run of 2,000 copies, of which only 200 ever reached store shelves. If that doesn’t sound rare enough, it’s actually believed that there are only 20 copies of the game still in existence, of which a mere two are factory sealed.

One of the two factory-sealed copies of Stadium Events has popped up on an eBay auction twice previously, the first time in 2010 with a winning bid of US$41,300, although the auction never went through as the winning bidder neglected to pay what they’d bid. In 2011, another factory-sealed copy actually sold for a relatively paltry $22,800. We’re not sure which one of the factory-sealed copies has resurfaced again this year, but we do know that it’s gone from its starting price of $5,000 to $99,600 in a little over a week (and the auction isn’t even finished yet!)

Here’s a short video showing some of the gameplay from Stadium Events. Would you pay $99,600 to play this game? Bear in mind, you’re going to lose several thousands of dollars just by opening the box. Worth it?

Do you think video games deserve wildly inflated prices just because of some distribution mishaps during their original run? For $99,600 you could buy 1,992 copies of the “best video game of all time”, The Last of Us. Or 3,984 copies of Deadly Premonition, arguably the “best worst video game of all time”. Or even 996 copies of Rule of Rose, a survival horror game set aboard an airship in 1930s England, which was banned for groundless reasons before anyone in the UK ever got a chance to play it. (Disclaimer: math has never been my strong suit, so these calculations may not be completely accurate, but you get the picture, right?)

▼ Good games are still worth playing, even if they’ve lost their boxes and booklets over the years.

Perhaps there are worse things to spend $10k on if you’re a mega-rich collector type who gets their kicks from obtaining some of the world’s rarities, and the extravagant price tag of Stadium Events might actually serve as an example of the fact that video games are indeed a worthy form of art, and should be afforded the same respect as paintings, film, and literature. What do you think?

Source: Livedoor
All Images:  © Evie Lund/RocketNews24