Many of us have often wondered if some toy or game from our childhood could be worth a lot of money today. And honestly, a lot of our old stuff could be worth something, if only we hadn’t done the pesky thing and actually opened and used them. Fact of the matter is, no matter how collectible an item is, it is worth far less if it’s been used or even opened.
But hey, don’t give up hope: you could always find an unopened Kid Icarus game cartridge from 1988 and sell it online for $9,000. That’s exactly what happened for Reno Resident Scott Amos.
The story is a simple one; his mother was constantly imploring him to clean out the many boxes of his childhood memorabilia from the attic of her California home. On this past Mother’s Day, 40 year old Scott Amos finally caved into his mother’s wishes and got ready to do some attic cleaning. As he sorted through the five boxes of old stuff, he chanced upon an unopened copy Kid Icarus, a very popular Nintendo game from 1987, still in the JCPenny shopping bag it was bought in. The receipt read $34.85, from December 1988.
Consulting two different video game experts, Amos was told the cartridge could be worth a significant sum of money, and upon putting it up for auction on Heritage Auction’s Comics and Comic Art auction, he found that it was indeed worth a fair sum: about $9,000, to be exact.
One may wonder how an old game sold for almost $10,000, but this copy is more rare than you might think: there are only 10 known sealed copies of Kid Icarus in the world. Valarie McLeckie, video game consignment director of Heritage Auctions, let us know just how rare the occurrence was.
“To find a sealed copy ‘in the wild,’ so to speak, not to mention one in such a nice condition and one with such transparent provenance, is both an unusual and rather historic occurrence. It’s certainly one of the most surprising just because of the origin of the game and how it was found. Typically, these higher-end, rare titles that we receive on consignment are from collectors who know what they have, and in the case of Kid Icarus, it was found in someone’s attic with the receipts and the price sticker still on it so it also has a clear chain of provenance, which is very unusual as well in this type of collectible.”
So take it from Amos, you might want to check around your old storage areas and see what parts of your childhood might be worth something. That said, don’t expect to get quite so fortuitous, or you’ll likely just be disappointed. As McLeckie said, this kind of thing is a rare occurrence indeed.
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