A rare Nintendo 64 Foxdata Chrome Leopard controller was valued at about £1,000 by an auction house after a Manchester man unearthed it from his loft.
The Foxdata set of designs included Desert Storm, Red Rain, Purple Forest and Chrome Leopard. Released in the late ’90s, Liam Clousdale received the special controller for his 14th birthday and it remained in storage for nearly 30 years.
“The ads for it appeared in the official Nintendo magazine, the N64 Magazine as it was known back then,” said Clousdale in an interview with the Manchester Evening News. “At that time you picked stuff out of the adverts in the back pages.”
“All my friends used to go to each other’s houses to play and, to avoid confusion, everyone liked to have their own unique pad,” he continued, adding that the Foxdata Nintendo 64 was the only one that featured four ports for controllers.
In order to make sure that he and his friends weren’t picking up the wrong controller, he used the Chrome Leopard controller and “loved having the craziest looking pad.”
It was only when a friend spotted that another Foxdata controller had been sold at auction that Clousdale had the idea to dig his own out of the loft.
A conversation with the head of Hansons’ Toys and Video Games Auction told him that the controller was worth an enviable amount owing to the rarity of the design.
“That range that has become increasingly sought after in the video game market,” said Hansons’ David Wilson-Turner of the Foxdata set.
“Though information is limited, it’s believed Foxdata produced around 800 of these customised controllers across the four designs, meaning there could be less than 200 examples of Liam’s controller in the world.”
“I was very surprised by how much it was potentially worth. I’m happy to pass it on to a proper retro collector,” concluded Clousdale.
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