Rare Nintendo Card Sells for Over $10,000, Will you pay that much of amount? Or do you have extra kidneys?
Trading cards have seen a massive increase in secondary market interest over the last year, and rare cards have gone for big bucks. Of course, we’ve seen this a lot with Pokemon cards, but one rare Nintendo card just sold for a stunning $10,600 on eBay.
Rare Nintendo card are buzzing the market.
All the way back at E3 2002, Nintendo was promoting its new e-Reader platform by handing out prize cards on the showroom floor. Unfortunately, the winning cards were all presumed to have been lost or destroyed, but one has just (reportedly) emerged from the void and is up for sale on eBay.
As this 2007 story recalls, Nintendo reps at E3 2002 were giving out packs of e-Reader cards to attendees, and among them were certain Kirby cards whose only purpose was to serve as part of a competition. There were three different results you could get from these otherwise identical cards; a “no-prize” result on the most common cards, 100 “second prize” cards, and only ten “first place” ones.
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If you ever got a “first place” card, you had to hand it over to Nintendo to claim your prize. Those cards were then destroyed, which led to the “first place” Kirby cards becoming supposedly the rarest E-Reader card out there, both because of their number and because E3 attendance in 2002 was so limited.
A word of caution before we go any further: while the seller has a long-running account dating all the way back to 2005, with a 100% seller rating, this card hasn’t been independently verified or had its condition graded.
That said, they do claim that the card has been swiped in an e-Reader to confirm it was a winner and have provided photos of a Game Boy Advance and e-Reader setup showing the congratulatory message. There’s even a video of the card being swiped:
Three packs of the cards were discovered by Twitter user @robertjanderson. Anderson opened the packs and scanned each card using the GBA e-Reader device. One of these cards was a first prize winner, and while it’s far too late to redeem the card, @robertjanderson got a very nice prize when they put the winning card on eBay! An image of the card can be seen in the Tweet embedded below.
The bottom Line
For those unfamiliar with Nintendo’s e-Reader, the device was a short-lived accessory for the Game Boy Advance. Released in 2002, users could swipe bar-codes through the device for various reasons. Some unlocked games (as in the Manhole Game & Watch card above), and some even unlocked content in games like Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire and Super Mario Advance 4. In the days before DLC was a common thing, the cards actually served as a crude way for Nintendo to release extra content for some games.
While this Kirby card’s purpose has long passed, its rarity clearly makes it a very cool collector’s item. It’s impossible to say whether this item landed in the hands of a big Kirby fan or maybe just someone that loves rare video game merchandise. Still, it’s amazing to see that this item exists and generated such massive demand!
