The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of the most popular video games ever released and it has been ported to more platforms than I have time to list. Yet, someone still decided to spend $600 on a sealed Xbox 360 copy of Skyrim at a recent online auction.
As spotted by Axios and some reporter over there (good luck dude!) an unopened copy of Skyrim sold for $600 on July 11. It was part of the same lot of items that included the outrageously expensive Super Mario 64, which also sold on the same day for $1.5 million, though some onlookers are raising eyebrows at what’s really going on.
It still sort of breaks my brain to see a super easy-to-find game like Skyrim being sealed away in one of those plastic boxes and sold on a website for so much money. It seems like only yesterday that I was picking this game up at my local GameStop and now it’s selling for over half a grand. I’m usually quick to blame the rich, but in this case the price is just low enough that it’s very likely a diehard Elder Scrolls fan bought this to add to their collection. Kotaku has contacted Heritage Auctions about this game.
While $600 is far, far less than a million and a half bucks, it’s still an abnormal price to pay for a game that is available on nearly every video game platform released since the Xbox 360 and PS3. Hell, Skyrim Enhanced Edition is available on Gamepass and includes all the extra DLC. What makes this version of the game special, according to Heritage Auctions, is that it received a 9.2 rating from video game grading service Wata. That means it’s in near-mint-perfect condition, though that’s not that hard to believe considering the game isn’t even a decade old yet.
If you want to grab this copy of Skyrim for yourself, you can make a $900 offer to the new owner. But Heritage Auctions warns that they aren’t currently looking to sell and don’t respond to most offers. So, better luck next time. (Please don’t spend $900 on a copy of Skyrim.)
Skyrim wasn’t the only modern game to fetch a higher than expected price tag. The original Red Dead Redemption on Xbox 360 sold for $384. The slightly older original Tomb Raider, released on PS1 in 1996, sold for a more impressive $144,000. These more recent and less rare games going for such high prices at auction are more evidence that the retro game collection scene is expanding. Odds are you might have something worth a few hundred bucks sitting in some closet right now. But as with all bubbles, this one is likely to pop one day. So I wouldn’t sit around on your sealed copy of Fallout 3 on PS3 too long.