SNES "Donkey Kong Country" Competition Cartridge, ca. 1995
GUEST: I've got a Super Nintendo "Donkey Kong Country" competition cartridge. It starts up in the game, like, right at the first level and just goes for, I want to say, five, ten minutes, and then just shuts the game off-- I'm assuming that either a friend gave it to me or I could have bought it and not known that I accidentally got the competition cartridge. I love going to flea markets, though. And I've had like a game reseller there offer me $1,000 for it. And that was probably around 2012, which made me realize even more so I should probably hang onto it because it must be worth a little more than that at least.
APPRAISER: It's a particularly rare and iconic video game. This was from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, S.N.E.S., which is a great system, I grew up playing it.
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: Um, I loved this game as a kid. So this was made for competitions.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: There were two competitions. The first one was in 1994. It was Nintendo PowerFest.
GUEST: Oh, wow.
APPRAISER: And then in 1995, there was a Blockbuster Championship. And the goal of the competition was to get the highest score within five minutes. So then after the competition was done, some of the copies were sold through-- Nintendo had a magazine, Nintendo Power, which was to subscribers. Those subscribers were offered the opportunity to buy the cartridges, 'cause they weren't-- didn't need them for the competition anymore.
GUEST: Okay, interesting.
APPRAISER: So I don't, it's not clear how many or if all of them were sold that way.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Some of the literature suggests that there were only 2,500 copies of the competition cartridge made.
GUEST: Oh, wow.
APPRAISER: And very few wind up getting into the market. A lot of them are in collector hands.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: As you can see, this cartridge has Hollywood Video stickers on it.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Uh, which is interesting. And I wasn't able to find any record of the competitions being done at Hollywood Video. The 1995 competition was a Blockbuster competition.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: A major competitor or the major competitor of-of Hollywood Video.
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: I see there's writing on it.
GUEST: Yeah, that's my initials. Just at some point, my brother and I, friends, trying to keep games separate. And by then I had already had this one just inexplicably in my possession for a while. So I was like, it's mine.
APPRAISER: These sell not frequently.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: Conservatively, at auction, I would estimate it between $2,000 and $4,000.
GUEST: Oh, right on.
APPRAISER: And it could be more. One recently, a graded copy that didn't have the-the initials Sharpied, the label on the top, which was added... Okay. ...and it didn't have the slight damage to the back sticker. That sold for $5,500.
GUEST: Oh, wow. Geez Louise.
APPRAISER: So it could-- I would keep it as-is. You could always submit it for-for grading, but with the, with the-the writing on it, they probably would give you some kind of qualification on the grade.
GUEST: I gotcha, okay, cool. Yeah. Well, thank you so much.
$3,000 - $4,000 Auction
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Understanding Our Appraisals
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Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
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