Rare NES title takes $43,000 at auction
Still in shrink-wrap
The seller said it was a "priceless" item, and while bidding didn't quite reach infinity, one lucky bidder has now agreed to buy a "one of a kind" copy of Bandai's 1986 videogame Family Fitness Stadium Events for $41,300 (£27,102).
Developed for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the game was released in Europe in 1988, and in the US the year before. The copy on offer on eBay was a US, NTSC copy still in its shrink-wrap and with its $29.99 price tag.
Stadium Events was not a success, however, and relatively few copies made it on to shop shelves. Production was limited, and these factors combined to make the title something of a rarity, particularly now more than 20 years on from its release.
Long pre-Wii, Stadium Events allowed players to engage in on-screen athletic events through the Family Fun Fitness Mat peripheral, later bought from Bandai by Nintendo and re-released as the Power Pad.
Sprints, hurdles, long jump and triple jump were among the ten events in which players could compete.
The competition for the game this time round saw the bids lead from $6.16 to $100 before hitting $9800 on the first day of the auction. Over the next ten days, bids shot upward and upward. ®
COMMENTS
Rarity
The PAL version of the game isn't actually rare, so there are often plenty of copies of that on eBay. The US version wasn't on the shelves for very long because Nintendo bought the rights to the game from Bandai and released their own version of it, along with the Nintendo Power Pad (the original DDR pad).
The actual rarity of this game is disputed, some claim it was only on sale in one shop for a limited amount of time, but generally the ones claiming this are the people who own the game and want to protect their investment! There have been quite a few reports of people buying this game from all over the US, so the claims of only one shop selling it seem to be false. After this auction, I would expect to see quite a few copies make their way onto eBay and we will start to get a better idea of just how rare the game really is.
Since it was taken off the market prematurely there could even be a pallet full of copies of this game sat in a warehouse somewhere. It has happened before with other Nintendo games previously considered rare.
3-1/4" - Floppy Disk
The 3-1/4" disk(ette) is indeed a floppy disk. The floppy medium is encased in a hard shell.
I remember people BITD calling them hard disks.
Hah!
You *could* shoot the dog on the arcade version. It would reappear from stage right on crutches and lecture you on the correct target of choice.
not as rare
As my copy of Great Giana Sisters for the Spectrum.
And as for "floppy" disks around the 3" size, Amstrad didn't help with their really hard cased 3" disks, or the 3" Quikdisks, which were 2.8"!
