The Rarest, Most Valuable Items in Video Game History

As an avid retro gamer and content creator focused on the hobby, I‘m fascinated by the incredibly rare, valuable, and history-making gaming items spanning rare consoles, impossible in-game drops, and decades-old limited edition cartridges and merch that hardly saw the light of day. The rarest things in video games as of 2023 are items like:

• Ultra-rare consoles like the Nintendo PlayStation Prototype
• Wildly valuable CS:GO skins and other in-game items with less than 1% drop rates
• Special limited edition physical copies of games with print runs often below 100 units

The key traits that make these items so mythical and valuable are tiny production runs often due to failed prototypes, distribution issues, or exclusive contests, paired with extremely miniscule randomized digital drop rates. As a result, these gaming artifacts are next-to impossible to obtain through legitimate means, with some having estimates of less than a few hundred units existing worldwide. Let‘s overview some of these gaming holy grails:

The Near-Impossible to Find Consoles

Gaming legends like the Nintendo PlayStation and 1990 Nintendo World Championships cartridges standout when looking at the rarest, most mythic consoles and hardware ever produced:

The Nintendo-Sony PlayStation Prototype

This failed collaboration between the two Japanese companies in the early 1990s resulted in only 200 prototypes ever being produced. It was essentially a Super Nintendo with a built-in CD-ROM drive thanks to Sony. Dumping ROMs proves it plays SNES cartridges as well as Sony‘s PlayStation music CD format. Attempts to commercialize it into a console ultimately failed when deals fell through. With a mere 200 units out there, it‘s considered the gaming industry‘s crown jewel of rare consoles. A unit in excellent condition recently auctioned for $360,000 in 2022 likely making it the most expensive video game item ever sold.

1990 Nintendo World Championships Cartridges & Gold NWC Cart

Produced in 1990 for a special gaming competition tour hosted in stores across America, exactly 116 custom NES cartridges were manufactured by Nintendo for the event. Grey in color and labeled Nintendo World Championships 1990, the cart contains playable time-trial demos for Super Mario Bros, Rad Racer, and Tetris. Auction sales for these 116 cartridges routinely break $100,000.

If that wasn‘t rare enough, a special gold colored NWC cart was produced as the grand prize for the gaming competition winner, Thor Aackerlund. To this day, just the one gold 1990 Nintendo World Championships cartridge exists. It was last sold in an auction for $140,000. Safe to say both the 116 grey and the 1 gold copy are amongst the rarest Nintendo items of all time.

Valuable In-Game Skins & Items

Beyond rare hardware and console prototypes, hugely popular competitive games have also produced some of the rarest digital-only items over the years thanks to tiny drop rates. Let‘s analyze some of their droprates:

CS:GO Dragon Lore Skin – 1 in 400 Chance

The ultra rare souvenir quality Dragon Lore skin for the AWP sniper rifle in CS:GO essentially hits the jackpot of skin rarity. Analysis of case opening drop rate data shows your chances of acquiring one is roughly 1 in 400 cases opened on average. A 0.25% chance for each case means legitimately acquiring a Dragon Lore skin comes down almost entirely to luck given how low the odds are. Despite being only a digital cosmetic, a Factory New grade Dragon Lore sold for $61,000 at auction in 2020.

Axolotl Blue Variant – 0.083% Spawn Rate

Minecraft recently added the popular Axolotl mob in 2020 after a fan vote. But spawn data mining revealed the blue variant has the rarest color mutation chance of them all: just a 0.083% rate of appearing naturally. That‘s a 1 in 1200 chance! Making the already cute blue Axolotl incredibly hard to ever see.

Runescape Partyhat Items – Discontinued in 2001

These goofy New Years‘ Party Hats were lost to the sands of time when developer Jagex deliberately discontinued them back in 2001, never to return again. Coupled with the fact they can‘t be traded through the Grand Exchange, it makes procuring one incredibly difficult. Today, their price exceeds the max cash limit ability of the game engine itself. The rarest colored party hats like purple often run $1500+ on Ebay. And that‘s for an in-game cosmetic item! Their rarity and nostalgia produces that kind of insane secondary market value.

High Value Limited Edition Retail Copies

Beyond the digital realm, special limited print run editions of actual games themselves routinely break records at auction due to tiny world wide production runs. Let‘s analyze some of the heavy hitters:

1990 Nintendo World Championships Gold Cartridge – 26 Copies

Remember that lone 1990 Gold World Championships NES cartridge produced for winner Thor Aackerlund? Well an additional 26 gold carts were produced as well and given to finalists of the gaming competition. These identical gold carts awarded to elite high scorers at the tournament feature the same grey & gold color scheme and contain the standards Super Mario Bros and Tetris demo mashup software. At an auction in early 2019, one sealed gold NWC cart sold for $100,150 thanks to the miniscule print run of just 26 copies on Earth.

Zelda Majora‘s Mask Adventure Set – 2000 Copies

Releasing right at the tail-end of the Nintendo 64‘s lifespan in 2000, this special edition of Majora‘s Mask came bundled as part of a special "Adventure Set" alongside the matching gold cartridge, a shirt, deck of cards, and more memorabilia. But only 2000 sets were ever produced in America. And only a couple weeks ago, a fully boxed, pristine copy broke auction records by selling for $1320 USD. Yet another example of a tiny production run producing an incredibly scarce collector‘s item.

Radiant Silvergun Saturn Version – ~5000 Copies

Regarded as one of the greatest 2D vertical shooters ever made, this absolutely legendary Sega Saturn game was already rare in and of itself, selling very poorly with an estimated ~5000 copies sold in the late 90s. But its reputation has only skyrocketed in recent years to cement it‘s place as a highly influential title that commands staggering aftermarket prices decades later. $800+ is normal for this Saturn grail on eBay, assuming you can even track a copy for sale. Radiant Silvergun proves game quality over time overcomes even obscure, low-print releases.

So in summary, I‘ve hopefully spotlighted the insanely rare sorts of gaming items spanning impossible prototype hardware, unfathomably scarce digital skins, and vacancy-filling limited edition physical releases that truly occupy the upper echelon of valuables across the entire video game collecting landscape. If you miraculously come across any of these near-mythical items in your collecting journeys – never let them go!