Nintendo Wii Fanboy

James Baker collects games, but probably not in the same way that any of us collect games. Baker recently coughed up $15,000 for one of the 26 gold-colored NES carts that were originally manufactured for the Nintendo World Championships in 1990 (only twelve are still accounted for) -- in fact, we're fairly certain that his is the cart we posted about recently.

Speaking to Edge about his latest acquisition, Baker confesses that spending so much on a single videogame is "pretty crazy," but also says that he "doesn't really see it purely as a videogame."

Not only is the guy richer than us, he's also a lot braver -- when he received the cart, he popped it into his NES to give it a go! "I didn't even need to blow on the end of it to get it to work," he said, nonchalantly. You better believe that playing such a game would be the last thing on our minds. Instead, we'd be handling it very delicately, and then only after washing our hands several times over.

(Fun fact: $15,000 would cover the cost of 1.5m Wii Points, which in turn could be used to purchase the whole of the current U.S. Virtual Console line-up -- more than ten times over.)

In your travels, you may have heard of the "holy grail" of video games. This rare NES game, known as Nintendo World Championships 1990, has only 116 copies in circulation.

Now it seems that the owner of one of these carts has done what any other red-blooded capitalist would do, and put it up for sale on Ebay. The asking price? $12,000. There's also a "best offer" option, but the seller says he (or she) will not be budging much on the price.

This game is a must-have for the serious game collector, certainly, but we don't imagine too many folks have $12,000 to throw around. And, if by any chance you do, consider buying us something nice for steering you in the right direction, m'kay?

[Via Technabob]

Nintendo recently held a fashion show at their Nintendo World Store in NYC, where gamers displayed clothing items for sale in the store, as well as fanmade creations. We've developed a new classification system for Nintendo fandom based on this event and the accompanying photo gallery:

1. People who play Nintendo games
2. People who wear Nintendo t-shirts
3. People who make their own Nintendo t-shirts
4. People who model those t-shirts at Nintendo events

We personally fall into level 3 of the Nintendo Fanboyism T-Shirt Scale. We think it's a pretty good measure of fandom, although it doesn't take into account the whole "working for a website called Wii Fanboy and writing about Nintendo all day" thing. Hmm.

[Via GoNintendo]