The game calls out to collectors. It is seductive because of its rarity but also a testament to the darker side of a hobby reaching new heights of popularity.
It isn't a good game. It's a boring game. Released in 1987 by the Japanese company Bandai, Stadium Events was made for a piece of peripheral hardware called the Family Fun Fitness mat. Playing it required jumping on the mat's sensors to emulate running, the characters in the game sprinting, hurdling in accord with how fast the player could go. The graphics weren't anything special. The easiest way to play was to give up running and crouch in front of the pad and slap your hands on the sensors as fast as possible -- cheating.
Nonetheless, Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa thought the technology could be huge, so the company purchased the mat and relaunched it as the Power Pad. Stadium Events was then rebranded as World Class Track Meet, so as "not to confuse the market," according to Gail Tilden, who worked for Nintendo at the time.

But what happened to the Stadium Events that had already been made? Nintendo and Bandai have declined to shed any light on the matter, leaving collectors to speculate. Rumor had it that the game had been sold at only one Woolworth's, which turned out to be false. Other collectors subscribe to the theory that Nintendo destroyed the remaining copies.
Not even Howard Phillips knows the truth. He was the face of Nintendo of America from the mid-'80s until 1990, testing and promoting NES games in Nintendo Power magazine. (A child of the '80s might remember him as the guru in a bow tie in the "Howard and Nestor" comic.) "There were 10,000 copies, maybe, produced," he says. "That sounds like a crazy- big number given that so few have shown up. Ten thousand copies for the North American release was close to minimum run. If there were 10,000, I don't know where they ended up. I don't have recollection of us burying them in a landfill. Destroying them or reworking them would've been a laborious task. Getting the label off would've been overly laborious on a per-unit basis. So ... the rarity is a mystery, isn't it?"

Tim Atwood discovered copies of the game. In 1992, he was on a crew cleaning out an abandoned warehouse near a JCPenney on the east side of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and at the time didn't know much about Nintendo. The word was ubiquitous -- the NES had been out for six years -- but meant only Mario to a guy like Tim. Workers in the warehouse were tossing everything into a garbage bin, including dusty arcade cabinets. Tim saw a pallet of small cardboard boxes in the corner of the warehouse; those boxes turned out to be about 250 sealed cases of individual games for the NES made before 1991, all waiting to be scrapped. He knew someone with a storage space. For reasons he still can't explain, he decided to keep the pallet for himself instead of throwing it away.
Twenty-four years later, he had become something like a myth, the 60-year-old who loved Mountain Dew and playing the now-retro NES, who might be sitting on a fortune. Even those closest to him didn't know the whole truth of the cases. Finally, his friend Tom Curtin persuaded Tim to take just one picture, to send a message to the video game collecting community. It was a blurry photo, but the words stamped on the side of the case came through clear enough: BANDAI AMERICA, INC. STADIUM EVENTS. 6PCS. Tom posted the picture on NintendoAge.com, the largest online gathering place for fans and collectors, with the title: After years of waiting ... it is here and it's beautiful!
"That's when the frickin' s---storm happened," Tim says. "I should've kept my big mouth shut."None of this would've happened had Jennifer Thompson not gone thriftin'.

This was in April 2013, and she was browsing clothes and $1 DVDs at the Steele Creek Goodwill in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, when she noticed it behind the glass counter. The video game title sparked a memory, a Yahoo article about the rarest games in the world. Jennifer carefully drove her '99 Honda Accord across the street to McDonald's, just to use the restaurant's Wi-Fi to make sure she hadn't been wrong. She then crossed the street again and purchased the game for $8 from the $30 she had in her bank account, praying the clerk wouldn'trecognize what it was and stop her.
When she took it for validation to a used video game store in Charlotte, the young man behind the counter rustled open the plastic bag and beheld the game -- pristine in its cardboard box covered by much of the original cellophane -- coughing the words "Oh my god." He offered her all the money in the register for it. She turned him down.
Before Stadium Events for the Nintendo Entertainment System came into their lives, Jennifer and her now-husband, Jeff, were scraping by. They lived in a double-wide trailer with a mouse problem and a buckling floor, so close to the Carolina Speedway that the sounds of engines from the dirt track kept them awake at night. Jeff had been laid off from his job working power lines, and Jennifer was taking classes at Belmont Abbey College, collecting coupons so they could get free deodorant and shampoo. The couple were slowly saving money, had plans to buy a house, but didn't know how many years it might take.
This game could change all of that. It had a strange mythology, and a sect of people who obsessed about it and were insane enough to spend their mortgages just to acquire it.

TIM ATWOOD SAT silently at his home near a dairy farm in central Michigan, smoking a joint, his own blend of weed grown in his backyard. He named it Kid Icarus, after the famous but infuriating NES game. He was contemplating: Would he ever really consider selling his sealed case of Stadium Events?
When his friend Tom posted the fuzzy image of the case on Nintendo Age, collectors called him a dangerous hermit, and some questioned whether the picture was real. Others were glad he could conceivably destroy the game's value by flooding the market.
"That's actually my last case," Tim finally revealed. In fact, he continued, he originally had not one but three sealed cases of Stadium Events, each containing six copies -- upward of $300,000 worth of games. He'd already opened the other two and sold off the contents the past few years. He chose collectors he liked and made those lucky recipients sign a nondisclosure agreement, keeping the source of the game and its price secret. That would mean instead of there being five sealed copies of Stadium Events, as verified by the Video Game Authority grading network this year, there were actually 23, when you include the six still in Tim's possession and the 12 people who had one but couldn't tell a soul.
Tim insisted he didn't need the money. He occasionally sold some games on eBay when he needed cash, drew his disability from a car accident and lived an otherwise quiet life. Once, he said, he'd given someone a $1,000 game for a single dollar, just to see the look on that person's face. He did stuff like that to piss off other collectors, whom he blamed for inflating the value of the game.
IN 2015, TOD heard from a man named Jay Bartlett, who loved video games so much he took on a quest to meet other collectors, trying to procure every licensed NES game within the span of a month. It was, literally, a Nintendo quest, a documentary of the same name that trailed him on his road trip. Stadium Events, the movie foreshadowed, would be the hardest of all to get.
At the end of the movie, Jay visited the only orthodontist in Bedford, Indiana.

Jay stood in Tod's basement as the orthodontist held his copy of Stadium Events, considering whether he would sell it. Tod knew he didn't need three copies of the game. He didn't want to hoard them, and he knew other collectors wanted it. Tod saw plenty of himself in Jay, that feeling of wanting to be complete. He held out the game, his copy with the long cut in the back of the box -- relinquishing his ownership, passing it like a family heirloom from one obsessive to another.
"He was the perfect buyer," Tod says today. "Someone who was passionate about it, someone with a great background story." But even now, Tod admits he dreams about what might be inside Tim Atwood's remaining box and whether anyone could ever persuade Tim to sell. Obsessions don't stop just because you have everything you obsessed over.
For Jay, as he carried the game in a leather satchel from Indiana to his home in London, Ontario, Stadium Events seemed an archaeological artifact. He felt an awesome power; he was a new member of an arguably insane club. Hearing him describe how he landed the game is like listening to someone recount a feat of athletic prowess, as though acquiring it were a matter of endurance: "There aren't many people who could go for it ..."
He wanted the game on display, where its importance would cast shadows on all the other games in his collection. He felt the game altered how people viewed him. He had Stadium Events, he was worthy; he'd passed some invisible threshold.
"No other game changes you like this one," he said. "You can't go back after it."
Almost every night before he could go to sleep, Jay walked the hallway past his game room, opening the door a crack, staring for a few seconds into the darkness, then flicking the light switch, illuminating the box with the runners on the cover, one with the sweatband and one with the red shorts, and the telling scar running down the back.
He had to make sure it was really there.