Rare Donkey Kong game fetches $9,000 at auction

If you're a bit of age like yours truly, then you can remember the Commodore era, and games like Boulder Dash and Donkey Kong. A rare Nintendo Donkey Kong game sold for $9,000 at an internet auction. It is a handheld Game & Watch device, a forerunner of the Gameboy. I also owned several of these.

Game & Watch games were popular in the 1980s, and Nintendo sold millions of them. Game & Watch games were small portable devices with one or two LCD screens and a few buttons that could only play one game. It is a special version of Donkey Kong published by Nintendo after more than 20 million Game & Watch games were sold. The game is being auctioned off on eBay. Never before has such a large sum of money been spent on a Game & Watch game.

According to John Hardie of the National Video Game Museum in Texas, it is not known how many copies of the limited-edition Donkey Kong game were created for this occasion. "Perhaps there are fifty of them, or perhaps Nintendo has a pallet full of them at a department store. Even if I had to guess, I'd assume there were more than three of these produced. But, well, it's just a guess, right?"

The price of 9,000 euros for a rare game is insignificant when compared to other recent auctions. A gaming cartridge from Nintendo's popular video game Super Mario Bros., which was released in 1985, just sold for a world record $2 million. A month ago, a Super Mario 64 gaming cartridge from 1996 sold for $1.56 million at an auction in New York.