(NEXSTAR) – For that kind of money, the game should come with a functional Ocarina of Time.
A rare unopened edition of “The Legend of Zelda” originally produced for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987 has sold for a whopping $870,000, Heritage Auctions announced on Friday.
The Texas-based auction house says the sale broke its own previous record for a video game, set in April 2021 with the $660,000 purchase of a sealed “Super Mario Bros.” game.
“I had a lot of confidence in this game, and, yet, I still feel like the reality of today’s bidding exceeded my vision of how it would play out,” said Valarie McLeckie, a video games specialist with Heritage Auctions, in a press release issued Friday. “Making history is never an easy thing. I’m just really proud we got to be part of this yet again.”
The game itself is from a limited production run that spanned “a few months” in late 1987 before being replaced in 1988. There was only one previous production run, according to Heritage Auctions, but it is “widely believed” that only one sealed copy from that previous production run exists today.
“Essentially, this copy is the earliest sealed copy one could realistically hope to obtain,” the auction house said of the video game sold on Friday.
The 870,000 “Zelda” game was part of Heritage Auctions’ first-ever Video Games Signature Auction, offering popular unopened titles including “Zelda: Ocarina of Time” for Nintendo 64 and “Pokemon Red Version” for Game Boy, among dozens of others.
The Video Games Signature Auction continues through Sunday.