Here's your chance to own one of the rarest Nintendo games ever made, if you don't mind that it looks like it's been to hell and back.

A copy of the highly coveted Nintendo World Championships cartridge is for sale on eBay. The starting bid is $4,999.99 – a bargain when you consider these can go for twice that much. Of course, copies fetching that kind of money generally haven't had their labels ripped off and the word "Mario" scrawled in ballpoint pen on the sad remains of said label. But if you want a copy and don't have the disposable income needed to add one in mint, or even good, condition to your collection, this may be your only chance.

The elusive Nintendo World Championships cartridge was created for a nationwide Nintendo Entertainment System tournament in 1990. It features a game comprised of bits taken from Super Mario Bros., Tetris and Rad Racer. At the end of all three segments, the game tallied the player's score; winners advanced to the national championships. At that event, each of the 90 semi-finalists received a copy of the game as shown here, but not all beaten up.

Additionally, Nintendo put 26 copies in a golden, Legend of Zelda-style shell and gave them away as prizes in Nintendo Power magazine. The golden carts are worth more than the grays, but even the gray ones sell for crazy amounts of money and very rarely switch hands. Collectors tend to hold onto them for dear life. At a live auction for Child's Play Charity in 2011, a gray cartridge sold for over $11,000.

With many copies known to exist, these aren't the absolute rarest videogames in the world – a complete edition of the Atari 2600 game Air Raid sold for $33,433.33 because it included the only known copy of the game's instruction manual – but they're close, and certainly the most notorious.

This particular copy represents a classic collector's conundrum – do you hold out for an expensive trophy in mint condition, or do you settle for a "placeholder" simply to tick that box on your checklist? You might say no and hold out for perfection, but there are many collectors who'd put this on their mantlepiece even if it was coated in expired skunk pheromones.

I predict this will sell, simply because there are so few available and the price keeps going up.