One of the rarest Nintendo 64 games in the collecting world sold for a small fortune this week at Heritage, as a sealed copy of “Clay Fighter: Sculptor’s Cut” fetched $175,000 in its inaugural auction appearance.
With such an extraordinary price tag — placing it as one of the most valuable N64 games of all time, how exactly did the 1998 title receive its distinction as a rare grail of video game collecting?
Blockbuster had been renting video games since its founding in 1985 and soon began partnering with game studios and distributors to offer Blockbuster-exclusive titles, only available at their brick-and-mortar stores for rental.
Following the modest success of “ClayFighter,” a quasi-“Street Fighter” parody game released in 1993, Interplay partnered with Blockbuster in 1998 to release "Sculptor’s Cut" as a special edition variation of a sequel title for the N64 as a Blockbuster North American exclusive.
It’s believed only 20,000 copies of the game were ever made. Due to the nature of having a game pass through countless hands, rented over and over again by gamers, most copies took a beating.
The most delicate part of the complete game, the manual was the most impacted, and has become one of the most expensive video game manuals on the market. One manual from the game, alone without the game itself, sold for $3,800 on eBay in 2022.
But CIB examples — meaning “complete in box” including the cartridge, manual and box — are, unsurprisingly, even more expensive (and rare). The record price paid for a CIB Sculptor’s Cut, graded WATA 6.0, is $12,000 in 2022.
Just 11 CIB examples have been graded by Wata in total. For many of the most expensive video games, sealed copies are the priciest due to the natural rarity — after all, the first thing one does when buying a video game is open it in order to play, right?
Sculptor’s Cut is a unique situation considering its designation as a Blockbuster exclusive. With gamers renting the game rather than buying it, there were rarely any opportunities to preserve a sealed copy in the first place as it would have come already opened.
Even though it has been said Blockbuster sold many of its copies to liquidate inventory as the company moved on to newer titles, sealed copies have remained unspeakably rare.
Until the discovery of the Heritage copy, there were only one or two graded sealed examples across all grading companies. Now, that number is just two or three.
One reason for the discrepancy is it’s believed a VGA 90 copy listed on the population report was crossed over to Wata in recent years.
No sealed examples have ever transacted publicly, making the CGC 9.4 A++ selling this week at Heritage a first.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.