Gaming, as a hobby, can be very expensive for those willing to go all-in on the merchandise. Publishers love offering crazy and costly collectors editions bundled with all sorts of branded peripherals and memorabilia. But one person recently spent $600 on an otherwise typical copy of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.

The sale was part of an auction that took place on Sunday. The never-opened box contains the original Xbox 360 version of The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. And while $600 isn’t an insane amount for rare older games, some might find it strange to pay so much for such an easily accessible title.

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Heritage Auctions hosted the sale, which included several other big-ticket items. The most spectacular was a copy of Super Mario 64 that went for a record-breaking $1.56 Million. The Legend of Zelda’s sealed copy raked in $870,000, with a never-opened copy of Super Mario World selling for $360,000. An early copy of Tomb Raider also went for $144,000. But the most interesting item might be the $18,600 U.S. Army training device resembling an M16 that plugs into a Super Nintendo.

Compared to those prices, $600 doesn’t seem like that much. Neither does the $384 unopened copy of Red Dead Redemption. Still, it’s a little strange to think of a copy of Skyrim going for ten times its original value. That’s especially true when one considers that Skyrim isn’t exactly a challenging game to find. Not counting backward compatibility, it’s available on five different platforms, most recently being ported to the Nintendo Switch in 2017.

It’s also interesting that, apart from being remarkably well preserved, this copy isn’t anything special. It wasn’t a limited-run collector’s edition or a special game of the year release. Instead, it’s the same game many players picked up on November 11th, 2011, but that’s precisely the point. The box is almost exactly as it was when the game was released a decade ago. Wata Games, a company specialized in rating vintage games, gave this copy of Skyrim an impressive score of 9.2/10. That means it’s about as close to mint-condition as one can expect from a sold copy.

That’s not too surprising considering the game’s age, as 2011 wasn’t that long ago. The older games still sold for several times as much as Skyrim, mainly because of their age and scarcity. Assuming the current owner keeps it in good condition, and this isn’t just another bubble destined to burst, who knows what that copy of Skyrim might go for in 2031.

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is available on PC, PS3, PS4 Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PS5 and Xbox Series X/S through backward compatibility.

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Source: Axios