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A collector finally attained one of the rarest Nintendo cartridges in existence recently, after purchasing Nintendo PowerFest 94 for $12,000.
According to Yahoo's Plugged In blog, collector JJ Hendricks was the finder, which started when someone contacted him about it after he wrote about it in 2010.
The title was created for the Super Nintendo, specifically for a video game competition Nintendo held in the mid-90s across the U.S. and Canada. It contains tournament versions of three SNES games -- Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels, Super Mario Kart and Ken Griffey, Jr. Baseball.
Apparently, a mere 32 were made. All copies were supposed to be recycled after the tournament, but some survived. According to PriceCharting.com, only two copies of PowerFest 94 are known to exist.
Hendricks wrote about the rare game back in 2010, and after he heard from a reader who was interested in selling his copy, he embarked on the quest.
After verifying its authenticity, the two began negotiating. The seller wanted $50,000, which was way out of Hendricks' budget. Things fell apart, but amicably. A year later, the seller reached out again, this time with a $25,000 price tag. Again, they couldn't find a mutually acceptable compromise.
For a while, it looked like another buyer would step in, but in January, the seller said the deal had fallen through. Hendricks offered $12,000, and it was accepted. Hendricks said it "took 74 emails, 27 months, 6 phone calls, 5 failed meeting attempts, 1 sack of cash."
Despite the hefty pricetag, Nintendo PowerFest 94 isn't the priciest game in the world. Two years ago, a collector paid over $41,000 for a copy of the ultra-rare Stadium Events game, released fort the original NES system.
An unsuspecting mom sold a copy of the same game in 2010 for $13,000 on eBay.
