The retrogaming market has been growing steadily for several years and, since the late 2000s, the prices of old video games have skyrocketed. The publishers have also smelled the good vein and have managed to capitalize on the nostalgia of the players. One can think, for example, of Nintendo, which released, released the famous NES mini at the end of 2016, a mini-console on which you could find around thirty dematerialized games that were among the greatest successes of the original console released in 1980.
For some players, nostalgia is above all succeeding in getting their hands on original editions, and in this little game, the prices can sometimes reach totally absurd amounts.
A Zelda cartridge at 4000 euros
The cartridge in question is not that old since this little story dates back to 2005, more precisely at E3 2005. During its conference, Nintendo presented a 2-minute trailer of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – which will be released the following year on Gamecube and Wii.
Small gift to the journalists present on site, a press kit including said demo on a Nintendo DS cartridge, which inevitably was produced in limited quantities, 500 copies to be exact. De facto, the cartridge becomes a rare object, therefore a collector’s item.
More than 15 years later, it is very difficult to get your hands on it. According to pricecharting, the soberly named cartridge “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – Preview Trailer” trades around €4,000, a nice sum for a trailer. You can always rummage through your old boxes in hopes of finding one, but with only 500 copies in the wild (and probably a few that have gone to waste), your chances of getting your hands on them are infinitesimal.
Always more
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, retrogaming prices have skyrocketed in recent years. We can think of Pokémon cards, the most expensive being Pikachu Illustrator (which is also the rarest), Charizard 1st edition and Raichu Prerelease that you can acquire for a few thousand or even a few tens of thousands of euros.
Multitudes of objects are of interest to collectors, but old games, still in working order, are those whose price soars the most. Last year, the absolute record was shattered. In July 2021, a sealed cartridge of the Super Mario 64 video game sold for 1.56 million dollars, or more than 1.3 million euros.
These record sales followed one another last year and the enthusiasm around its products should not fall anytime soon. So, if you have old dusty boxes in your attic, we advise you to take a look. Without knowing it, you may be sitting on a gold mine…
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