Rare Atari game donated to Fort Worth Goodwill store sold to bidder for record amount

Those worthless old Atari games stuffed in your parent’s attic may include a rare commodity.

That’s the lesson learned after an alert Goodwill employee in Fort Worth helped the company raise more than $10,000 via auction earlier this month.

Goodwill North Central Texas item processor Alex Juarez was sorting a bin of old Atari games when he came across an ultra-rare “Air Raid” game cartridge. The game was produced by Men-A-Vision in 1982 and playable on the Atari 2600 system. This particular game cartridge was especially rare because of its T-shaped design and blue coloring. Only 13 copies are known to exist, according to Goodwill.

Goodwill put the game up for auction on its website on June 10 and it quickly had more than 200 watchers. It eventually sold for $10,590.79.

“When I was younger, me and my dad used to watch these ‘top 10 most expensive video games’ and stuff like that, and this would pop up all the time on those,” Juarez said. “It’s kind of surreal. It’s more of a piece of history rather than an expensive game to me. It’s weird, knowing this will be the only time you get to hold something like this.”

There weren’t a lot of “Air Raid” games produced, which makes it so valuable to retro video game collectors.

A previous “complete edition” copy sold for $33,433.30 in 2012 and a cartridge-only copy sold on eBay in 2011 for $3,575, according to Goodwill.

“This is the highest-selling single-piece item that we’ve had,” said Goodwill North Central Texas representative Rosemary Cruz.

What can Goodwill do with $10,000? The organization says it can provide day habilitation services for a year for one disabled adult or provide 20 homeless individuals with job placement services and community resources, or help 10 at-risk youth earn their GED and a paycheck at the same time.