Nintendo World Championships 1990 Game Cartridges



The Nintendo World Championships Gold and Grey Cartridges

Cartridge

Nintendo World Championships 1990 gold NES cartridge For the competition, 116 special game cartridges were manufactured. 90 of these copies exist as the official gray cartridge and were given out to City Finalists after the 1990 NWC concluded. Each gray cartridge has a unique number making the cartridge easier to track and extremely difficult to counterfeit. The other 26 are gold—like the The Legend of Zelda cartridge—and were given out as prizes in a separate contest held by Nintendo Power magazine.[2] Both versions of the cartridge feature DIP switches on the front, which may be used to alter the time limit. To play the cartridge, one must have a controller connected to both controller ports and press start on the second player's controller. For the competition, there was a special switch that would start all cartridges simultaneously.

Collectible Value

The Nintendo World Championships 1990 game cartridge is considered to be the rarest and most valuable NES cartridge released, promo cartridges aside.[4] The NWC Gold cartridge is often compared to "holy grail" items from other collectible hobbies, such as the T206 Honus Wagner baseball card, or the Action Comics #1 comic book, and the gold variation has in fact been nicknamed "the holy grail of gaming" or "the holy grail of video game collecting". The circuit boards for the gold and gray cartridges are identical. The gold cartridges have no numbers and are almost impossible to track their origin like their gray counterparts. The gold casing holding is the same from The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

&nbsp On March 18, 2007 a listing appeared on Myebid.com in which a gold cartridge appeared to have been inadvertently included in a bereavement sale of 24 NES games; according to the auction, a father was selling the possessions of his deceased son. The auction ended at $21,400,[8] though collectors have speculated that neither the listing nor the bids were legitimate.[9][10] On 9/16/2009, a gray cartridge was sold at a garage sale at 76th and Emerson Street in Minneapolis for $2,000 cash but gray cartridges often bought from champions $5,000-$6,000.

In 1998, Mike Iaroosi sold his gray cartridge to a collector for $1,600. It was later sold in 2007 by the collector for $10,000 in a private sale. To date, of the 26 NWC gold cartridges produced, only 12 copies have ever surfaced. In 2008, a gold cartridge went for $15,000,[11] and the next copy to surface sold in June 2009 for $17,500.[7] Most recently, in December 2009, a copy surfaced on eBay as part of a charity auction for World Vision; it is currently at $13,100.[12]