Holy Grail NES Castlevania sells for over $90,000, losing bidder predicts "a $250K flip" but the buyer says he wanted "the first game my mom ever bought me"

gamesradar.com:

In one of the biggest auctions for a raw boxed video game, a rare sealed hangtag copy of Castlevania for the original NES recently sold for $90,100 on eBay after a bidding war that started at $37,000, all for a hard-to-find game with a literal sticker price of $27.87. 

The eBay seller described the game as a "high grade grail" in brand new condition from the first production run. As Digital Eclipse's Chris Kohler notes on Twitter, the rare game is believed to have come from an estate sale in Texas. The Castlevania seller is located in Frisco, Texas, while another seller from Grapevine, Texas – about 30 minutes away, according to Google Maps – also recently began listing similar games at almost exactly the same time. 

The Grapevine seller, who sold a copy of Kid Icarus for nearly $82,000 just weeks after the Castlevania auction, explicitly stated: "I am not a game player or collector. I am a reseller who bought the estate of an avid game collector. I will list items to the best of my ability and try to describe games accurately. They are not graded and I am not familiar with how to grade video games." 

While the source of this rare Castlevania copy, which may well be the most expensive video game ever sold on eBay, is still unconfirmed, there's a non-zero chance it's connected to that Texas estate sale. The seller has listed and sold several other games much like it, all pretty recently. Last month, a copy of BurgerTime for the NES went for over $11,000, for example, while a comparable copy of Trojan brought in nearly $7,000. The seller's current listings focus on collectible cards, and currently peak at $152. 

Of course, that's all small potatoes compared to this Holy Grail Castlevania. The auction kicked up quite some dust in the collector scene, with losing bidder Grailmonster discussing the back-and-forth on Instagram. "Win some, lose some," he said in a post after narrowly losing the auction. "Congrats to the winner (I know him and he deserved it way more than