Winning bid on super rare NES game is $99,902 [UPDATE]

[UPDATE] Following the publication of this story, a reporter for Wired spoke with the seller, who reportedly said the auction was bid up by trolls and the high bidder does not intend to pay up.

The original story is below.

$99,902 is the winning bid on the extremely rare NES game Nintendo World Championships that was auctioned off on eBay today.

Historically, that is an extremely high price for this item. For comparison, In 2011 another copy of the Nintendo World Championships fetched $11,000 on eBay, and that version was in much better condition.

This could very well be a fake bid, which are common on eBay. However, while the winning bidder's identity is kept confidential, a limited view of his eBay history shows that he has made 16 bids within the last 30 days on a total of nine items. The bidder also has a 100 percent positive feedback score of 775. Interestingly, the buyer was the first and last to bid on the item.

Finally, there is always the possibility that the entire auction is fake to begin with.

If this is a legitimate sale, the media attention around the auction significantly raised the value of the item. The auction was covered on all the games and technology websites you'd expect, as well as mainstream publications like the BBC.

As we reported when we first noticed the auction, only 116 copies of Nintendo World Championships were manufactured and were distributed in 1990 only to winners of a special competition. The game is considered one of the rarest and most valuable NES games in existence.