15 Rarest and Most Valuable Games Ever

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From bad-ass golden light guns to one of a kind Atari cartridges, we count 15 of the rarest and most expensive games of all time.

15 – Elemental Gearbolt – Assassin’s Case Edition,

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  • Getting this PlayStation 1 game will cost you between 1,400 and 1,750 US dollars as there are only 40 of this particular edition of the game as the case was awarded during a 1998 E33 tournament.
  • The case includes the game, a golden light-gun – not real gold mind you, but still cool looking – and a memory card that’s also golden.
  • As you might expect, Elemental Gearbolt is a light-gun game with an orchestral soundtrack and a Science-Fantasy theme with RPG elements, which was pretty uncommon at the time and earned the game awards because of it.

14 – Eli’s Ladder,

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  • This is the rarest educational game ever made and getting it for the Atari 2600 will set you back anywhere between 1500 and 1700 US dollars, there’s no particular reason why this game had a limited release.
  • The game came with motivational stickers and a wall chart designed for children, which are equally hard to find, as you might imagine as cases with cartridge base games often go missing or are thrown out when bought.
  • The gameplay is pretty simple, you answer maths questions about addition, subtraction; interestingly enough they advertise the game as focusing on ‘drill and practice’ gameplay, which just sounds like lovely fun.

13 – Karate – Ultravision Release,

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  • Another 2600 game, better get used to them because they’re all over this list, buying one of these in mint condition will cost around 4000 US dollars, despite the fact that the functionally identical Froggo release is actually pretty common.
  • Interestingly enough Ultravision originally intended to make their own console, but they only ended up releasing two poor quality games, one of which being Karate which ended up being rereleased by Froggo.
  • This game was designed by black belt Joseph Amelio, but I can’t find anything about him online so I guess it’s just some karate master the devs knew, or indeed was just one of the devs.

12 – Answer Software’s Gauntlet,

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  • No it’s not that Gauntlet, but anyway, it’s an extremely rare game that will cost you between 3,000 and 5,000 dollars if it ever actually goes up for sale, no one has been willing to part with it since the early 2000s.
  • This game was released only via mail order and didn’t even come with a proper case, instead it had a flimsy foam casing that was probably only included to prevent the game for being damaged during its transit.
  • This Gauntlet is basically an Indiana Jones rip-off, where the main character looks much like Indi and you run through a gauntlet in the jungle in an effort to impress a tribe of warriors.

11 – Tetris – Megadrive Release,

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  • Yes, the most ubiquitous game ever (well, maybe it’s Minecraft now) is also one of the rarest, with the cheapest copy going for 3,000 US dollars, proving once and for all that collectors value rarity over gameplay.
  • Not only that but it might as well be a rip-off since it was created when Nintendo held the license for Tetris meaning that SEGA just went and made it behind their backs and hoped no one noticed.
  • I guess it’s not like you can mess up Tetris easily can you? Oh wait, yeah I forgot about EA, I think I might actually prefer to spend 3,000 bones on this than be forced to play the crime against gaming that is the mobile version of Tetris.

10 – King of Fighters 2000 – English Release,

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  • There are only 100 of these babies out there it’s hard to get your hands on this one, not only that, it’s also completely legitimate, like all games on this list rereleases of it did nothing to tamper with its value with copies selling between 3500 and 6000 dollars.
  • I’m guessing the only reason there’s so few of them is that the Neo Geo was incredibly expensive and far from popular, so any even remotely niche game from Japan couldn’t have received good sales without a decent marketing push.
  • Despite that, this is a well-loved fighting game series, from what I can tell anyway: I’m not exactly what you’d call a fighting game fan, I tend to button mash, but boy do I button mash like a champ.

9 – Ultimate 11 or Super Sidekicks 4 – European Release,

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  • One of the few sports games on the Neo-Geo, you’d think that the European version would do better in a region that actually follows soccer, pricing for this is only based on rumours as it’s just that rare, although the rumours say it’s between 4,800 and 10,000 USD.
  • It seems pretty arbitrary to me that a simple region change will cause such a massive price-hike, I mean they’re both the same game with the same gameplay.
  • This is actually the final release in the Super Sidekicks series, it includes 80 national teams and this version apparently no longer keeps track of which player scores goals, but if you play well a boss team will appear with SNK fighting game characters as players.

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