An unopened, autographed original physical copy of StarCraft is drawing a lot of attention on Reddit and other social media, with more than 400,000 views on Reddit alone.
The game belongs to Mark Chandler, who lives in Toronto and has run game-related businesses including TIGS (an event that Chandler started to help game professionals address mental health challenges) and GamesCon, an early game expo in Canada. It’s unique in that it has the signatures of 30 or so people from the original development team at Blizzard.
Chandler received a couple of copies back in 1998 as a first edition of the game. Chandler was running a game LAN party with 500 computers and demo rooms for games. StarCraft was one of the games that GamesCon showed off in a multiplayer tournament. Normally, players had to play multiplayer on slow phone lines, but at the tournament it was much faster on LANs.
How did Chandler get this copy? Chandler had called up Blizzard marketing head Bill Roper, who said that StarCraft had sold more than a million copies of StarCraft. Roper sent Chandler a couple of signed copies, with one of them for the winner of the StarCraft tournament.
“It was never my plan to keep this as a keepsake, but it’s always been with me these past 28 years,” Chandler said in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.
Chandler has come across it every couple of years whenever he moved boxes around. He took a picture and put it on Facebook a while ago and a bunch of folks commented on it. Then he decided to sell it and did a Reddit post six days ago and it exploded in popularity. It has about 427,000 views as of today and 234 comments and 3,200 upvotes. It’s the No. 1 post on Reddit/StarCraft.
“I’m surprised as I’ve never had a post as popular on Reddit,” Chandler said. “It’s interesting that so many people are seeing it.”
Golden Auctions told Chandler that his signed copy could attract attention as a one-of-a-kind artifact, given the interest in the post he did on Reddit and the fact it is unopened. The auction people said that from what they could tell, it was authentic.
Chandler, who is a friend of mine who regularly plays games with me, also drew some attention from the Nexon Museum. Sanggon Woo, conservator of the Nexon Museum, wrote to Chandler about their appreciation for the rare StarCraft artifact. The museum in South Korea is interested in reviewing the artifact as a meaningful piece of gaming history. Chandler thinks this might be a good home for the game, at least temporarily. But he lives on a fixed income and is retired and so he’s hoping to sell it for a good price.
Ironically, Chandler noted that people in this day and age have begun to appreciate physical discs, given Sony’s announcement that it will no longer ship physical editions of its games starting in January 2028. There’s been a big backlash from gamers about that decision from Sony, which evidently no longer wants to ship optical disc drives with its consoles.
Some rare game items have sold for high prices. A factory-sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. (1985) for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) has the record as the most valuable video game sold at auction. The game drew $3 million at Heritage Auctions.—graded 9.6 A++ by Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA). It came from an early production run featuring a rare “gloss sticker seal.”
Roper, who was the head of marketing at Blizzard at the time, verified the promo event for the StarCraft game box.
Roper said, “We didn’t do many of those boxes,” with perhaps no more than 100 or so. While Roper still has his, it’s a question of whether anyone else has kept theirs as long as Chandler has, in an unopened state.
“They were mostly for people on the team and our publishing partners,” Roper said. “We did always hold a few back for special events like the LAN event that was mentioned in the post. While the box isn’t a 1-of-a-kind, it *is* very very rare. Especially outside of anyone on the team.”
Roper is now a seasoned game developer who has worked on Hellgate: London, Champions Online, Disney Infinity, StarCraft, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, Diablo and more.