For many video game players, their first encounter with Princess Zelda, Link and the Ganon came in The Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo Entertainment System. However, the franchise did not start life as the well-known NES cartridge but made its debut a year earlier as an entirely different Nintendo format. Now a copy of that very first Zelda game is hitting the sales block at Heritage Auctions and is already hitting five-figures 12 days before the auction ends. This is probably not surprising have reached up to almost $30,000 in recent sales. Owning the very first iteration of a game that started one of the most popular franchises in gaming history – just before a new movie arrives to boot – is an enticing prospect for any collector. That is why the current bid of $10,500 is probably going to seem like pocket money compared to where its hammer value could land.
Before The Legend of Zelda hit the NES in 1987, Zelda no Densetsu: The Hyrule Fantasy was released in January 1986 as the first Japanese version of the game that would very quickly become one of Nintendo’s biggest and most enduring titles. Rather than being in the cartridge format that would be a hit in America, this version was released on the Nintendo Famicom Disk System as the genuine first edition of Link’s adventure. That detail already marks this example as something special for collectors to consider shelling out a hefty amount on, but it also carries the yellow “Disk System” text that was later changed to white, which indicates that the version up for sale is one of the first to have been produced. This is exactly the kind of minor detail that can easily turn a five-figure sale into something significantly higher if there right buyers are in the room when the final bids roll in.
Naturally, such a rare example of a 40-year-old game does not come to auction without having been graded first. This is where the details really begin to stack up in favor of a high sale value being on the cards. Along with historical significance, the one thing guaranteed to push up the price of an item is a high grading, which is something this disk comes with. The copy comes with a CGC grade of 9.2 A+ as a sealed copy with only some minor scuffing on the sticker seal, making it one of the most coveted iterations of this game out there. If owning a piece of gaming history is your collecting bag, then it could be time to dust off the gold card and prepare for it to take a beating when bidding heats up.
Of course, as with any auction, there are no guarantees of what final price the game will end up selling for. In the last few months, various iterations of Zelda no Densetsu have sold for prices ranging from lows of $1,187 to a high of $26,568. The latter example came in an August auction at Heritage, which featured the same yellow lettering as the current lot but a slightly higher 9.4 A++ grading. Whether this new auction will be able to compete with that is yet to be seen, but recently the price of vintage graded games has been skyrocketing. That makes it difficult to rule anything out until the hammer falls but it is hard to believe that this auction will not push beyond $20,000 in just under two weeks’ time.
