A gamer’s $8 Goodwill find has turned into a windfall of at least $12,000.
An unidentified woman bought the super-rare collectible NES game Family Fun Fitness: Stadium Events at a Goodwill thrift store in North Carolina. She is now auctioning the rare game on GameGavel, a video game auction site. The current bid is at $12,000, and there are still six days left on the listing.
She recognized the “Holy Grail” of the Nintendo NES, and recalled its fame from an eBay auction a few years prior for a group of games that fetched over $10,000 due to Stadium Events’ inclusion.
According to her interview on GameGavel, she is planning to use the money she makes from the auction to pay off her student debt.
This isn’t the first time a casual discovery has netted a gamer several thousand dollars. Red Sea Crossing, an independently-developed 1983 game for the Atari 2600, earned its owner $10,000 in a 2007 auction. Last year, a copy of Air Raid fetched $33,000.
When a copy of Stadium Events surfaced in 2011 it sold for $38,000.
Katie Williams is a freelance games journalist and critic. She tweets at @desensitisation and hopes that one day, a bird will tweet back.
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