10 Incredibly Expensive Sports Games

Within the last 10 years, the price of retro video games has skyrocketed. Some games have become unreasonably pricey over the last few years, from titles like Little Samson on the NES to Rule of Rose on PlayStation 2.

Sports games have not been immune to this effect. While your typical Madden NFL or NBA 2K game plummets in value the minute the next entry releases, some sports games have managed to grow in value over the years. There are several reasons why these games have increased in value so dramatically. In general, it comes down to supply and demand. As more and more people have begun collecting retro sports games, the supply of those games has decreased due to failed hardware, broken discs, or lost copies. So, let’s look at some sports games that will cost you a pretty penny to add to your collection.

Tiger Woods 99 PGA Tour (PlayStation 1)

The first entry on the list is a game you wouldn’t expect to be expensive. The EA Sports PGA Tour series was one of the most widely produced series of games in the late 90s and early 2000s. The series started back in 1990 and ran until 2015. The series returned last year after several years in hiatus. So why is this one random game in the series so valuable? Well, it’s actually a pretty crazy story.

Before the game was released, an employee at EA Sports secretly hid a South Park short film inside the game’s files. Yeah, that South Park. It wasn’t just any episode either, it was the 1995 short Jesus vs Santa, which actually predates South Park, but still features the four main characters from the popular adult animated show.

By placing the game in a computer, players could find this short film in the game’s files as “ZZDUMMY.DAT.” Once it was discovered, EA Sports recalled the copies containing the film, calling it “objectionable to consumers.” Funny enough, South Park would later mock the video game series in a 2010 episode following Woods’s multiple off-the-course scandals.

If you have a copy of the game, you can check if yours has the hidden file on it. The UPC on the back of the recalled copies is 0 14633 07911 1. If your copy matches that, congratulations, you own a rare game.

Now how much is that rare game worth? According to PriceCharting.com, these copies of the game go for about $50 at the time of writing. That might not seem like a lot, especially compared to today’s video game prices. But for a 20+-year-old PS1 golf game whose only differentiating factor is a five-minute cartoon full of dirty words, it’s a good bit to pay.

FIFA 14 (PlayStation 2)

Here’s another game that on the surface you wouldn’t expect to ever hold any value. The FIFA series is one of the best-selling yearly video game franchises on the planet, selling millions of copies every fall. So why, again, do we have a random game from the series holding so much value years later?

FIFA 14 on the PlayStation 2 was released on September 24, 2013, alongside the PSP, PS Vita, Wii, and Nintendo 3Ds versions. These versions were all labeled as the Legacy Editions of the game. This means the game has the same gameplay and features as previous entries in the series, with only the rosters, kits, and soundtrack being updated. This is a practice the FIFA series continues today on the Nintendo Switch. This release made FIFA 14 the first in the series to be released across three console generations at launch. Well, almost. The game was released for the PS2 and PS3 on the same day and was a launch title for the PS4 and Xbox One when they were released a couple of months later. That means there is a PS2, PS3, and PS4 version of FIFA 14.

Now why would FIFA release a game for a console that at that point was nearly two whole generations behind? Well, the PS2 was the best-selling console in history, selling over 150 million units. Because of this, new games were coming out for the system well after the PS3 was released. The popularity of the PSP and Nintendo Wii helped keep the PS2 releases coming as well due to their high install base and similar power levels. Both of these consoles also got the Legacy Edition of FIFA 14.

So, what does this incredibly late PS2 game cost these days? Well, the North American version is the rarest since it was only sold in Mexico and South America. This version will cost you about $120 complete in the box, while the PAL version is much cheaper at just $40. Not the most expensive games in the world, but definitely pricey for a FIFA game on the PS2.

John Madden Football ’93: Championship Edition (Sega Genesis)

Once again, we have another entry in an incredibly popular annual series that is still around today. However, John Madden Football ‘93: Championship Edition has a different reason for being so valuable.

The Championship Edition began as a rental exclusive game. This means you couldn’t purchase the game; you could only rent it from stores like Blockbuster or Hastings. The game later became available to buy to 1,000 customers through phone orders. This limited availability has made the game incredibly rare and valuable to collectors.

So how is the Championship Edition different from the original version of John Madden Football ‘93? Well, the Championship Edition included every Super Bowl-winning team from NFL history. There are also a handful of Super Bowl-losing teams included as well. Alongside these historic teams, there are also two All-Madden teams, one of current (at the time) players and one of retired legends.

So how much is this incredibly rare version of Madden? Well, just the cartridge alone will run you about $50. That’s almost as much as a modern Madden game costs! If you want the game complete in the box, you’ll have to pay about $200, by far the most expensive version of Madden I could find. In 2023, a 9.8-graded sealed copy of the game sold at auction for $43,000. That’s more than some of the players in the game were making as NFL players when that game was released!

ESPN NBA Hangtime ’95 (Sega CD)

Finally breaking away from the popular annual series we have ESPN NBA Hangtime ’95. This game was developed and published by Sony Imagesoft. This same studio also published games like ESPN Sunday Night NFL, ESPN SpeedWorld, ESPN National Hockey Night, and ESPN Baseball Tonight. I’m starting to see a pattern here. Well, if you don’t like those, they also published Mickey Mania, one of the best platformers on the Sega Genesis.

The game featured 2 on 2 gameplay with all 27 NBA teams at the time being included. This game was often compared to NBA Jam. The high-flying dunks and arcade move sets were definitely trying to capitalize off that game’s popularity. One thing that set ESPN NBA Hangtime ’95 apart was the ESPN license. Besides just flashing the logo, this game featured full motion video segments of ESPN commentators Dan Patrick and Stuart Scott introducing and commenting on your games. This feature was pretty ahead of its time for 1994.

So why is this game so expensive? I don’t know. Not much information is out there about this game. From what I could find, the game didn’t review the best and was in a very competitive market with how many basketball games were out there at the time. Add on top of that how expensive Sega CD games are in general, and you get to the price point we see today.

What is that price you ask? Well, a complete copy of the game will cost you around $250, while the disk alone will cost you $140. This is just one of those rare sports games that didn’t sell well and wasn’t popular enough to be remembered, which now makes it one of the more expensive sports games you can buy.

NFL Blitz Special Edition (Nintendo 64)

The NFL Blitz series was probably the most popular arcade football series ever made. The series was to football what NBA Jam was to basketball. Both series were created by Midway Games, who were also famous for creating the Mortal Kombat series. Like NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat, NFL Blitz began as an arcade game before making its way to home consoles in 1998.

NFL Blitz Special Edition was released exclusively on Nintendo 64 in November 2001. This was a rerelease of NFL Blitz 2001, which was released the year prior. This new version featured an updated roster and was basically a farewell to the Nintendo 64 for the series.

The reason NFL Blitz Special Edition is so rare is that it was a Blockbuster exclusive. During the days of the Nintendo 64, Nintendo made a deal with Blockbuster to produce exclusive games that you could only play by renting them from Blockbuster. If you look up the most expensive games on the Nintendo 64, most of them were these exclusive games.

So how much does this rare NFL game go for now? The cartridge alone goes for about $80-$100 these days. Meanwhile, finding it along with the box is incredibly rare, and will cost you over $200 to add to your shelf.

NCAA College Basketball 2K3 (GameCube)

NCAA College Basketball 2K3 is considered by many to be one of, if not the, rarest GameCube games out there. This game was the first in the College Hoops 2K series, as well as the only one to use the “College Basketball” name instead of “College Hoops.” It is also the only college basketball game ever published for GameCube.

Shortly after production of the physical disks for the game began, Sega ended all production of sports games for the GameCube due to poor sales. Barely any copies of the game made it to store shelves, with most estimates being around 4,000 total copies made. This makes the game easily one of the rarest games in the GameCube library. Sega would still produce professional sports games for the Xbox and PlayStation 2, until selling the developer behind most of these games, Visual Concepts, to Take-Two Interactive in January 2005.

The disc alone for NCAA College Basketball 2K3 sells for easily $100. A complete copy of the game today is worth about $350. This is well below some of the other rare GameCube games but is still a ton for an early 2000s sports game. Two sealed graded copies of the game sold earlier this year, one for $1,300 (9.6 grade) and $1,500 (9.8 grade).

Disney Sports Basketball (GameCube)

So, this game is just a weird one. In 2002 and 2003, there were four Disney Sports games released on the GameCube and Game Boy Advance. The sports represented were skateboarding, soccer, football, and finally basketball. These games were both developed and published by Konami.

In Disney Sports Basketball, you play 3 on 3 with some of the most popular Disney characters. Featured characters include Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald and Daisy Duck, Goofy, and even Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

That’s pretty much all we know about these games. There isn’t much information out there on them besides the fact that they regularly sell for a lot of money. In particular, Disney Sports Basketball was reviewed horribly. The game sits at 37 on MetaCritic. At its release, IGN gave the game a 4 out of 10, saying “Disney Sports Basketball arrives with the license intact, but take away Goofy and Mickey and you’re left with an overly simplistic, shallow, boring, run-of-the-mill three-on-three court game that bricks pretty hard.”

So how much does this awful game go for? Just the disc sells on eBay for about $250, already more than some of the games on this list sell for complete in-box. A complete copy of this Goof Troop of a game goes for roughly $1,200. That makes it one of the most valuable GameCube games out there.

F1 Racing Championship (Nintendo 64)

For once we have a rare Nintendo 64 game that wasn’t a Blockbuster exclusive! F1 Racing Championship was released on Nintendo 64 on December 8, 2000. The game was developed and published by Ubisoft. The game was thought by many to have been a European exclusive. In fact, on the Wikipedia page for this game, if you look at the Nintendo 64 release, it only mentions it being released in PAL regions.

Turns out, the game was released in the Americas, just not in North America. The NTSC version of the game seems to have been exclusive to Brazil and saw only limited production. Because of this, the game is incredibly rare.

The game reviewed fairly well when it was released. N64 magazine gave the game a 72% in 2000. The game features all 16 of the official F1 tracks from that time thanks to Ubisoft acquiring the FIA license. There are 22 drivers from 11 different teams for players to use. The game also included both LAN and split-screen multiplayer.

Now for the big question: how much does the game cost? Four of these cartridges have sold in the last two years, with prices ranging between $400-$700. A CIB copy of the game goes for more than double that, with average sale prices around $2,000, making it one of the rarest and most expensive Nintendo 64 games out there.

NFL Blitz 2000 (PS1 Greatest Hits)

This is another game you wouldn’t expect to be rare and expensive. NFL Blitz 2000 was the third game in the NFL Blitz series and was released on the PS1 and Nintendo 64 in August 1999. The game was a port of the arcade game, NFL Blitz ’99.

The game sold incredibly well, so much so that it qualified to be rereleased under the PS1 Greatest Hits series. This was a budget marketing label where PS1 games were rereleased at a discounted price. The requirements for a game to be included were simple. The game had to have been on the market for at least one year and have sold at least 150,000 copies.

With this being a budget rerelease, you would expect copies to be fairly easy to come by. However, NFL Blitz 2000 had the fewest copies made of any of the Greatest Hits games. It’s unclear why so few copies were produced. Some online have said the game was supposed to be pulled before going on sale, while others claim the game was sold in stores and just had a limited production run.

Regardless of why so few were made, the fact remains this is one of the rarest PS1 games out there. Some PS1 collectors have looked for years without finding this game. This game was so hard to find, that some collectors even claimed that it didn’t exist. It was just a myth.

However, in June 2019, YouTuber John Hancock uploaded a video titled “Complete PlayStation PS1 Greatest Hits Set.” This video is the most definitive piece of proof we have that NFL Blitz 2000 PS1 Greatest Hits actually exists. Even PriceCharting.com only has a record of a single complete copy being sold. That copy was sold in March 2024, for $2,500.

Since this is the only recorded sale we have of a complete copy, it’s hard to tell what its actual value is on the market. There’s no telling how much John or other collectors have paid for this game. Considering how rare and hard to find this game is, I expect that price to only go up in the future.

NBA Elite 11 (PS3 & Xbox 360)

The final game we will look at today is the failed continuation of the NBA Live series, NBA Elite 11. I remember when this game was originally canceled. When I was a kid, I loved the NBA Live series. NBA Live 07 and 08 were two of my favorite games on the PS2. I only moved over to NBA 2K once the NBA Live series went away.

Following the release of NBA Live 10, EA Sports attempted to rebrand the series, changing the name to NBA Elite. The first title following this rebrand, NBA Elite 11, was expected to be released in October 2010. A demo was released for the game during development that was plagued with bugs. Clips of these issues spread quickly across social media, causing the game to be delayed and eventually canceled.

Despite the cancellation, some copies had already made their way to retailers. A select few decided to keep the copies instead of returning them to EA. These copies made their way to sites like eBay and were sold for upwards of $2,000. However, after 2015, the game goes incredibly dormant. There was no record of copies being sold or found during this time.

Then, in 2020, a Reddit post from u/axiomatic_doubt to the game collecting subreddit showed two disk copies of the game. One was for PS3 and the other was for Xbox 360. At the time, this was the first known copy of an Xbox 360 disk of NBA Elite 11. All of the copies that were sold previously had been for the PS3 version. The user had the games graded by Heritage Auctions, and they were sold at auction for $5,000.

Next, in 2022, there were three copies of the PS3 version of the game sold. Two of the games sold for about $10,000 each. The third copy sold for a staggering $17,500.

Those are the most recent records of copies of NBA Elite 11 being sold. However, there are also the NBA Elite 11 PS3 consoles. 30 of these custom PS3 consoles were made. One console was given to a single player on each of the 30 NBA teams. Earlier this year, a purple version of this console appeared in a post on the game collecting subreddit from u/SnapVirus1. Also, this year, a blue version with the briefcase and controller was sold on eBay by The Salvation Army of Tampa for $3,000. That’s right, someone gave one of the rarest video game consoles on the planet to a Salvation Army store.

As far as the game goes, it’s hard to tell what the actual value of the game is today. Everyone agrees the games that sold at Heritage Auction for $5,000 went far below the actual value. Most estimates say there are less than 100 copies out there, with the 360 version possibly being less than 10 actual copies. I figure the $17,500 mark is closer to the actual value of the game. However, don’t be surprised if those numbers continue to go up as these copies exchange hands in the future.