Anyone who’s collected video games long enough can tell you that sometimes, games can get expensive. Like, ridiculously expensive. So expensive you could buy a car instead of a rare game and still have money to spare. What determines the price of a game comes down to a lot of factors; rarity, of course being a big one. But another one is console exclusivity. A game being console exclusive makes it rare, and thus harder to find, but it also makes it more special. A game published by Nintendo, or Atari, or some other illustrious company just makes it… better.
Collectors are willing to shell out big bucks for console exclusives. As we’re about to see, video game collecting is a serious business. These are the 10 rarest console exclusives, and how much they’re worth.
10 Shantae (Game Boy Color) - $2,700
Shantae for the Game Boy Color had the perfect recipe for a future rare, expensive collectible. It was released after the Game Boy Advance had already come out, meaning it didn’t sell much, it was released in limited quantities, and it later became very popular.
To this day, physical releases of all Shantae games are super expensive, but the original game takes the cake for the rarest and most expensive. Finding a Game Boy Color cart is hard enough, much less one complete in box and in good condition. One person spent $2,700 on eBay in 2020, according to PriceCharting.com.
9 Outback Joey (Genesis) - $3,000
Outback Joey is a weird game. It released bundled the Sega Genesis HeartBeat Personal Trainer, a rare variant of the console that came with fitness tracking hardware and software. Users could attach a heartbeat monitor to the console, and where it while playing the fitness software to exercise. Only 1,000 HeartBeat consoles were produced, so presumably, only 1,000 copies of Outback Joey exist.
The HeartBeat console is also required to play Outback Joey, making the game doubly rare. You can expect to pay upwards of $3,000 for the cartridge alone, but finding the console as well is almost impossible.
8 Pepsi Invaders (Atari 2600) - $3,500
You (hopefully) won’t be surprised to learn that Pepsi Invaders is one big advertisement, a game made for the Atari 2600 by Atari. Commissioned by the Coca-Cola Company for Pepsi, representatives handed out copies to salesmen at their 1983 sales convention. Only 125 copies were made, and many who received a copy threw it away because they didn’t care about video games.
A copy once sold for as much as $3,500 on eBay. That may seem low for such a rare game, but keep in mind, this is just a re-skin of Space Invaders. And a marketing ploy, at that.
7 Super Copa (Super Nintendo) - $6,900
Super Copa was released in North America on the Super Nintendo as Tony Meola’s Sidekicks Soccer, however, it got its new name in Brazil, because no one in Latin America cares about American soccer players. (It’s okay, neither we do). Not only that, but this version got two releases for some reason, the Brazilian one published by Playtronic, and another in the US by American Software.
Why the two releases in America for one game, we may never know. But that American version of Super Copa, complete in box, goes for a pretty penny. Somebody bought a copy on eBay for $6,900. Nice.
6 Aero Fighters (Super Nintendo) - $7,000
Aero Fighters is a remarkable game not for its rarity, but because it’s seemingly one of the most unremarkable rare games ever. Gamers don’t seem to care for the game itself too much, but because of a small print run, and collectors buying up the handful of available carts a decade or so ago, it’s become a bit of a collector’s item.
That’s how this otherwise mediocre shooter came to be worth $7,000, at least to one buyer. Anything and everything is worth however much someone is willing to pay for it, and Aero Fighters might be the perfect example of that.
5 Mr. Boston Clean Sweep (Vectrex) - $7,200
The rarest Vectrex game ever produced is another marketing ploy, though this one even more bizarre than Pepsi Invaders. Mr. Boston Clean Sweep was created in 1983 by CGE with the purpose of advertising Mr. Boston, a hard liquor brand. Not only that, but this is a re-skinned version of Clean Sweep, which is itself a Pac-Man clone.
Allegedly as few as four copies of the game were produced, and the game is appropriately pricey. According to PriceCharting.com, a loose cart of the game sold in 2010 for $7,200.
4 Red Sea Crossing (Atari 2600) - $10,400
Called the “holy grail of Atari Games” (haha), Red Sea Crossing is an Atari 2600 game about Moses' biblical parting of the Red Sea. Created by Steve Schustack, an urban legend has circulated stating after making 100 carts, Stack lost them all. Whether or not this is true, we’ll never know, as Schustack has seemingly disappeared off the face of the Earth.
Only two copies are known to exist now. One is owned by a private collector with seemingly little interest in selling. But the other was discovered in 2007, and later sold in 2012. The final price? $10,400, just for the cartridge.
3 Blockbuster World Championships II (Genesis) - $10,500
Blockbuster World Championships II is a weird one, even by the standards of this list. Created as part of an annual gaming competition hosted by now semi-defunct American video rental chain Blockbuster, the second version of this cart was created by Acclaim Entertainment. It contained shortened versions of Genesis games NBA Jam Tournament Edition and Judge Dredd.
Not many cartridges were made, but even then, they usually go for a couple of thousand dollars. But one copy sold in 2013 to a private collector who paid $10,500 for it. 2013 is the year most Blockbuster stores began closing, so this massive sale was likely a reaction to that.
2 Nintendo World Championships (NES) - $26,667
Speaking of gaming tournaments, Nintendo used to host their own. Nintendo World Championships on the NES is one of the rarest and legendary video games of all-time. Only a handful of copies were ever produced, containing truncated versions of Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and Rad Racer. But the real golden goose is, well, the gold version.
Created as a giveaway by Nintendo Power Magazine, only 26 copies of this variant were ever made. One sold in 2008 for $15,000, but prices are going up all the time. So far, the most anyone’s paid for one of these was in 2014, shelling out a whopping $26,667 on eBay.
1 Air Raid (Atari 2600) - $33,433
The most expensive and rarest console exclusive you can expect to never find is Air Raid for the Atari 2600. Featuring an odd cartridge with a blue handle, Air Raid is a fairly standard shoot ‘em up. Created as an unlicensed game by Men-A-Vision, only a handful of cartridges were ever produced, and only three or four or known to exist.
In 2012, a copy of Air Raid with its even rarer box sold for $33,433 in an auction on GameGavel. According to GameGavel’s Mike Kennedy, this made Air Raid “the most expensive ‘consumer-available’ video game ever sold at auction.” Most impressive of all? The seller found it buried in an old storage unit.