Fan Pays $90,000 for Castlevania NES, First Game Bought by His Mother Years Ago
More than $90,000 was paid by a gamer to have an original copy of Castlevania - the first game he got from his mother many years ago.
Nostalgia is a powerful tool for publishers wanting to "persuade" players to make further purchases. However, sometimes fans don't need encouragement to spend huge amounts of money on their childhood memories. This is how an original, packaged copy of the first Castlevania sold for over $90,000 on eBay.
The auction that ended last month was expected to cause a bit of a storm in the collector community (via GamesRadar). Not only because packaged copies of NES games are a real rarity today - even the much less famous BurgerTime in the same, perfect condition was sold for $11,000.
Castlevania is, after all, a cult series, perhaps a bit neglected by the publisher, but still recognizable. This is, after all, one of the two brands from which the name "metroidvania" originated (although the first installments had little in common with this genre). Furthermore, a fairly successful Netflix series served as a reminder to everyone about the existence of the series.
However, for the auction winner, this wasn't the motivation to spend such an absurd amount of money. 8 years ago, Tom Curtin spent slightly less on another, at least equally rare, copy of Socks the Cat and even started a Kickstarter campaign to complete its development and make it available.
The only thing is, this time the American had different motives. As he explained in an Instagram post, Castlevania was the first game he ever got from his mother. Much later, he began to look for the original edition of this title, although after 23 years he had come to terms with the fact that he would most likely not be able to obtain such a copy. And yet he achieved his goal.
One of the would-be buyers of the game took it in stride and even congratulated the auction winner (via Instagram). It is also expected that in the future, the value of this copy may increase to $250,000. He also pointed out (like other Internet users ) that this is probably the highest amount ever paid for a single game.
