A Pokémon Red prototype cartridge sold at Goldin for $123,220, level with the best sealed retail copy
A Pokémon Red prototype development cartridge sold at Goldin for $101,000, or $123,220 after fees, on 20 bids, per Dexerto (October 26). Bidding opened at $25,000, so the hammer came in at about four times the start. Goldin described the cartridge as previously undocumented, and PSA examined and authenticated it, recovering the first 32KB of its data, per Dexerto.
On October 22 the lot sat at a single $25,000 bid, per Time Extension, which reported that Goldin's auction would close on Monday, October 26. Dexerto does not give the exact closing date.
What the cartridge is
This is not a retail game. Time Extension describes a cart larger than a standard Game Boy cartridge, with clear casing, exposed circuitry, a serial of DMG-(F)KGDB-01 and a handwritten "Red P" sticker. It does not run in an actual Game Boy. PSA said it was confident in the cart's authenticity despite reading only part of the data, and Time Extension notes a header byte at address 0x014C set to 55 instead of the usual 00.
That makes it a development object: hardware used while the game was being built, with no grade in the way a sealed retail copy gets one. PSA's role here was authentication, not a condition grade.
The comparison: a sealed retail copy at the same house
The cleanest comp is a sealed retail Pokémon Red sold at the same auction house. In Goldin's Pokémon and TCG auction that ended February 15, 2026, a 1998 Game Boy Pokémon Red Version (USA), sealed and graded PSA 9.8 A++, sold for $124,000, per AuctionReport (February 16). That sale's top lot was the $16,492,000 Pikachu Illustrator.
So a cart that will not boot priced within $780 of the sealed PSA 9.8 A++ retail copy Goldin sold in February. The two buyers are paying for different things: the sealed copy is condition and scarcity at the top grade, and the prototype is provenance, a piece of how the game was made.
What it says about graded games
The February comp was a top-grade sealed copy. This sale shows a second route to six figures for the same title, where the story of an object prices like condition. It came in the same week Goldin's Pokémon 30th auction put its sealed Pokémon games in front of the same bidders, whose results had not been reported by October 27.
One sale is not a market. Prototypes surface rarely, each one is different, and this one is called undocumented, so there is no second sale to price it against. What it adds is a dated reference for development hardware from the first Pokémon games.
What to watch next
- Goldin's sealed Pokémon games results from the 30th Anniversary Auction, still unreported anywhere we could read by October 27.
- Heritage's Video Games Signature Auction, November 20–21 (Auction Watch), the next large graded games sale.
Figures are as reported by the sources below on the dates shown. This is market data and commentary, not investment advice.
Sources
- Dexerto, Super rare Pokémon Red prototype game sells for $100,000 at auction, Oct 26, 2026
- Time Extension, Rare prototype Pokémon Red Game Boy cartridge is sitting at $25,000 at auction, Oct 22, 2026
- AuctionReport, Top 20 results: Goldin's record-breaking Pokémon TCG auction, Feb 16, 2026