Households up and down the UK are being told they could have a goldmine in their cupboards if they have a copy of some extremely common Nintendo DS games.
Pokemon games have always been some of the best selling and most popular games on Nintendo consoles, with the most recent iterations – Pokemon Scarlet and Violet – selling more than 25 million copies.
Pokemon has been a mainstay game series since its first release in the late 1990s and the games have been best sellers through every sequel, from Red and Blue to Yellow, Gold and Silver, Diamond and Pearl right through to the current Nintendo Switch games.
But several Pokemon games for Nintendo’s DS console, which was extremely popular in the mid-2000s, have now become highly sought after titles, despite selling millions of copies at the time.
Ebay has listings of Pokemon Heart Gold for £35 for the EMPTY box, while games trade in chain CEX is selling the game for £110 second hand.
Pokemon Soul Silver is selling on CEX for £100, while Pokemon Black 2 is selling for £98.
A copy of Pokemon Sapphire on Gameboy Advance fetches £125 while Pokemon Leaf Green is selling for a whopping £185.
Amazingly, CEX is selling Pokemon Emerald for a crazy £250 on the Gameboy Advance, and is offering £187 cash to anyone who will sell them a boxed copy.
These are just the CEX prices. Pokemon Heart Gold is selling for £200 on eBay, while copies which have the Pokewalker device which originally came bundled with the game can fetch a staggering £345 on the auction website.
But why are old Pokémon games so expensive?
According to Ghetto Gamer: “Kids buy tons of them and having three kids myself, I’m very confident that more of those copies were destroyed or lost than copies sold to adult collectors.
“People spend all that time catching them all, and even if they aren’t playing the game now, they don’t want to sell it because then they would lose that team and all their Pokémon.
“Because the old Pokémon game cartridges are the only way to capture some Pokémon, players have no choice but to track down the old games if they truly want to ‘catch ‘em all’.”
So if you’re looking to make some quick Christmas cash, raiding your old games cupboards, attics and garages might be worth hundreds of pounds.