1994 · Super Mario Kart / Super Mario All-Stars / Ken Griffey Jr. Home Run Derby · Nintendo of America · United States (touring)
A national Nintendo competition whose custom cartridge became the rarest SNES game in existence — Nintendo made 33, then destroyed 31 of them for parts.
PowerFest '94 was Nintendo of America's touring competition for that year, following the model established by the Nintendo World Championships. Competitors played a single custom cartridge containing three timed challenges — a Super Mario Kart time trial, a Super Mario All-Stars segment, and a round of Ken Griffey Jr. Home Run Derby — and were ranked on a combined score, with teams advancing through regional rounds toward a final. What makes PowerFest historically significant is what happened to the hardware afterwards. Nintendo produced 33 of the custom cartridges, and once the competition ended, Nintendo of America dismantled 31 of them for parts. Two survive. That makes the PowerFest '94 cartridge the rarest Super Nintendo game in existence by a wide margin, and in 2012 the collector J.J. Hendricks acquired one for $12,000. The two survivors are not even identical: one is a preliminary-round build, in which a home run in the Ken Griffey segment is worth 10,000 points, and the other is the finals build, in which Nintendo had rescored a home run at 1,000,000 points — a change that completely reshapes which of the three games a competitor should prioritise.
Winner: Not widely documented; the tournament is remembered chiefly for its cartridge
Most rare games are rare by accident — a small print run, a cancelled release, a warehouse fire. PowerFest '94 is rare by policy. Nintendo built exactly as many cartridges as the competition required, and when the competition was over the cartridges were no longer required, so they were broken down and their components recovered. From Nintendo's point of view in 1994 this was simply tidy asset management. Nobody in the building appeared to consider that they were destroying the future rarest artefact of the console.
The result is an object whose value derives entirely from an internal administrative decision rather than from anything about the game itself. The software on the cartridge is not remarkable; it is three commercially available games, cut into timed segments. What is remarkable is that Nintendo made thirty-three of something and then chose to unmake thirty-one.
The scoring difference between the two survivors is the detail collectors find most interesting, because it is a window into how Nintendo tuned the competition in real time. In the preliminary build, a Ken Griffey home run scores 10,000 points, which places it roughly in balance with what a competitor can earn in the Mario Kart and All-Stars segments. In the finals build, a home run scores 1,000,000 — a hundredfold increase that makes the baseball segment overwhelmingly the most valuable thing on the cartridge.
That is not a small adjustment; it is a different competition. It means the optimal strategy in the final round bore little resemblance to the optimal strategy that qualified you for it, and that finalists arrived having trained for a scoring system that no longer applied. Whether that was deliberate — a way of preventing preparation from dominating the final — or simply a late balance patch, Nintendo has never said.