One of 26 rare NES gold cartridges goes up for auction today

Starting tonight, Goldin will be auctioning off one of the rarest Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges of all time. Nintendo originally created only 26 of these gold cartridges as prizes for Nintendo Power magazine readers in 1990. They’re so hard to come by that one sold on eBay for $100,088 a decade ago.

Hundreds of cartridges were created for the 1990 Nintendo World Championships, an event that toured the United States trying to find the country’s best gamers. Players competed for high scores in timed versions of Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and Rad Racer, which were all bundled onto special cartridges featuring physical switches, allowing the games’ time limits to be modified.

Most of these cartridges featured standard gray NES shells, but 26 of them were upgraded with a shiny gold housing and given away to winners of Nintendo Power magazine’s “Player’s Poll Contest” that same year.

These games were never sold in packaging, which partly explains why this particular cartridge, which appears worn and is missing its label, was given just a 4.0 grade by CGC Grading. (A grading of 10 would indicate mint condition.)

Despite the cartridge’s rough shape, bidding tonight will start at $10,000. According to the FAQ page on the auction house’s website, at that level, potential buyers will be prescreened to ensure they can pay up. That will help protect the cartridge’s unknown seller, but what about buyers?

Faking a rare cartridge like this and fooling CGC Grading would be a huge but profitable undertaking given the current demand for rare retro games and hardware. The easiest way to confirm that this one is legit is to win the auction and plug the cartridge into an actual NES, but that could end up being a budget-busting approach best left to deep-pocketed collectors.