A plumber from the UK has uncovered an exceedingly rare N64 controller in his attic and put it up for auction for £1,000 ($AU1,895).
The controller in question is a rare leopard print Foxdata controller for the Nintendo 64, dubbed “Silver Leopard”. It was part of a set of four limited run Foxdata controllers from the late 90’s that included other prints like Desert Stor, Red Rain and Purple Forest. These were notable for being legitimate, official N64 controllers that were given special, custom paint jobs rather than a third-party replica.
Liam Clousdale was given the controller for his 14th birthday. He asked for it specifically so that when he visited friends’ homes for multiplayer sessions, he could pick his controller out from the crowd, saying that “everyone liked to have their own unique pad … to avoid confusion.”
The opportunity to sell the controller came from a friend. “One of my friends spotted that a Foxdata pad had sold for a decent amount of money and remembered I had one,” Clousdale told the Manchester Evening News. He asked me about it, so I unpackaged my old pad from a box in the loft where it had been carefully stored away. I then contacted [an auction house] as I found an article about a previous gaming sale they had held.”
Head of Hansons’ Toys and Video Games Auction David Wilson-Turner, who spoke to Eurogamer about the find, says that there were only around 800 controllers produced across the four designs, meaning there could now be fewer than 200 of each design in the wild.
Some yahoo has managed to collect one of each of the Foxdata controllers and has them up on eBay for £2,000.
Image: Hansons’ Auctioneers
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