An extremely rare Nintendo game is expected to fetch thousands of dollars in an eBay auction.

Only 116 copies of Nintendo World Championships were ever made, as part of a special event in 1990.

The first bid came in at $4,999 (£3,000), but the game is likely to fetch more, one Nintendo expert said.

Unfortunately for collectors, the cartridge is in poor condition - with a ripped label and "Mario" written on it in ballpoint pen.

"This is quite unfortunate but happened many decades ago," explained the seller in his description of the "super-rare" item, adding that whoever wrote on the label did not have "a clue what they actually had".

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They are considered the holy grail among Nintendo collectors”

Created for the Nintendo Entertainment System - better known as NES - Nintendo World Championships was designed for a competition, and never went on general sale.

The game features shortened versions of three classics - Super Mario, Tetris and Rad Racer.

Competition entrants were given six minutes to amass points on the games, with whoever came top winning a trophy, a trip to Universal Studios and various other prizes. A detailed history of the contest and its winners can be found on Wikipedia.

Each of the 90 semi-finalists was given a grey cartridge like the one now up for auction.

Rarer still are the "golden" cartridges of the same game, sent out as part of a separate competition by Nintendo Power magazine.

Genuine copies of the game are hard to come by, and so the poor condition would not be too much of a deterrent to keen collectors, predicted Chris Scullion, games editor for Computer and Video Games.

"It's like finding the rarest Ferrari but with a scratch - you'd still buy it.

"They are considered the holy grail among Nintendo collectors."

In 2011, the same game sold at a charity auction for $11,000 (£6,600) - but it was in better condition.

The auction is set to end on 25 January.