Original NES Castlevania Cartridge Sells For More Than $90,000
“Everything just came together for a childhood friend and I this week as we were able to obtain this absolute beauty,” the buyer explained in an Instagram post.
A lucky online collector secured a sealed copy of the original Castlevania for the Nintendo Entertainment System on eBay, dropping a sure-to-be historic $90,100 to add it to his collection.
The auction first kicked off on March 16, with the first bid starting at an impressive $37,000. More than 130 bids were made before it reached its final selling price, which is likely the highest amount that a video game has ever fetched on the legacy online retailer.
The game is just one of 32 graded copies in the world today, according to memorabilia and collectibles enthusiast The Collectibles Guru.
“But what makes this game even more unique is that it has a hang tab, which means it’s a first production copy,” The Collectibles Guru tweeted.
The Collectibles Guru said that based on the featured photo for the game sold, it could be “one of the best-graded video games in existence.”
The new owner of this original sealed copy of Konami’s gothic, vampire-slaying side scroller appears to be Instagram user minus_worlds.
“The search is over after 23 years. I resigned to never being able to add this grail after years of searching,” the user, first identified by GamesRadar as game collector Tom Curtain, wrote in an Instagram post. “But, everything just came together for a childhood friend and I this week as we were able to obtain this absolute beauty.”
The buyer said he was willing to drop the exorbitant amount of cash on the ultrarare game because of the sentimental value it holds for him and his mom.
“This was the first game my mom ever bought me,” he explained in the post. “I still remember the phone call we made to buy it. It’s a core memory, as is this past week. Couple more plane rides to go but this beautiful first print hangtab Castlevania is almost home.”
In the post, he also shouted out fellow collector, Frank Giaramita, for bowing out of the fierce bidding battle. Giaramita was ready to plop $90,000 on the rare, sealed copy of the Konami classic before being outbid.
“Win some, lose some,” Giaramita said in a post on his own Instagram post. “congrats to the winner (I know him and he deserved it way more than me).”
While the game sold for a lucrative $90,100, its resell value dwarfs this sale price: Giaramita predicts that the game could be worth as much as $250,000 after it is graded.
The original Castlevania is a seminal title in gaming’s 60-year history. It not only kicked off one of gaming’s oldest franchises which continues on some four decades later, its action-heavy elements would later help establish one of the more popular genres, the progression-gated action game widely referred to as “Metroid-Vania,” in subsequent releases. The franchise chronicles the Belmont family’s never-ending fight against evil, vampiric forces including the dreaded Dracula.
