Economics teachers will love this long-form ESPN article as it provides a good demonstration of the value of scarce goods and supply and demand. The game: Stadium Events (I don’t ever remember this game which is probably the point). Let’s get the story started:

THE GAME CALLS out to collectors. It is seductive because of its rarity but also a testament to the darker side of a hobby reaching new heights of popularity.

It isn’t a good game. It’s a boring game. Released in 1987 by the Japanese company Bandai, Stadium Events was made for a piece of peripheral hardware called the Family Fun Fitness mat. Playing it required jumping on the mat’s sensors to emulate running, the characters in the game sprinting, hurdling in accord with how fast the player could go. The graphics weren’t anything special. The easiest way to play was to give up running and crouch in front of the pad and slap your hands on the sensors as fast as possible — cheating.

So, how many of the cartridges were produced?

Not even Howard Phillips knows the truth. He was the face of Nintendo of America from the mid-’80s until 1990, testing and promoting NES games in Nintendo Power magazine. (A child of the ’80s might remember him as the guru in a bow tie in the “Howard and Nestor” comic.) “There were 10,000 copies, maybe, produced,” he says. “That sounds like a crazy- big number given that so few have shown up. Ten thousand copies for the North American release was close to minimum run. If there were 10,000, I don’t know where they ended up. I don’t have recollection of us burying them in a landfill. Destroying them or reworking them would’ve been a laborious task. Getting the label off would’ve been overly laborious on a per-unit basis. So … the rarity is a mystery, isn’t it?”

So, what’s it worth? Whatever another collector will pay for it!

Down the years, the game’s mythos has only grown, a backstory muddled with wild yarns from collectors on how they got it and where they kept it. Someone in Atlanta named Cory (who was afraid to have his last name published) paid $35,100 for a sealed copy that he kept in an acrylic case with UV protection, which he then hid inside a Kashi cereal box. Dain Anderson, who created the Nintendo Age site, had considered the game his “white whale” for years — he traded more than $34,000 worth of Atari games to get just one copy. Another collector traded a $30,000 piece of art for a sealed copy (there were five verified to exist). A lawyer in Wisconsin got his through a divorce: “I don’t have enough to pay you,” his client told him, “but I hear you like Nintendo games …”

As for why you might want to think twice before investing in Stadium Events, one thing you should know:

Of course, a large part of Stadium Events’ value is driven by its perceived scarcity, which means that if more copies surface — copies that might have been sitting in some attic, or maybe in some abandoned warehouse — there could be turmoil in the collecting community, a sudden erosion of the game’s worth. And if the game loses its worth, what happens to the people who obsessed over it, let alone spent small fortunes on it?

Question for your students:

• What determines the value of an item?
• Why do you think this game cartridge has taken on so much value?
• What might increase the value of this game cartridge? Why?
• What is the risk to investing in Stadium Event cartridges?
• Are their other examples of things in your life where someone would pay well beyond the intrinsic value for a given item?

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.