News Photo by Mike Gonzalez “Earthbound,” a Super Nintendo game worth at least $350, sits on a display case at K-otic Games in Alpena on Thursday.

ALPENA — In a single week, Alpena-based video game store K-otic Games received two copies of an extremely rare retro role-playing game titled “Earthbound,” something store owner Gaige Tarsney never expected to happen at his shop.

A loose cartridge of “Earthbound” sells for nearly $350. It sells for nearly $800 when it remains in the box and can sell for $6,000 in mint condition.

“Just within a week, it’s not something you normally see,” Tarsney said. “It was purely coincidental. A lady sold a storage unit full of games.”

A few days after the first “Earthbound” came in, someone called the store and listed off Super Nintendo games he wanted to sell. As the man kept listing game titles, “Earthbound” perked up Tarsney’s ears and he told the man to bring the collection in.

“We gave him a fair price, and he was happy,” Tarsney said. “We’re happy.”

Tarsney said he’s sure the “Earthbound” copies are legit.

“Working with video games for so long, you can normally spot a fake, just because you see them constantly,” he said. “Oftentimes, the plastic has a different feel, a different texture, or even a different weight to it. We don’t sell reproductions or fakes, and I could tell these are the real cartridges.”

Tarsney said the game is rare for various reasons, including bad advertising campaigns at the time of its release, with phrases in gaming magazines such as “this game stinks.” But he said the biggest factor is the fact that “Earthbound” is a role-playing game that came out in the mid-1990s, when gamers in the U.S. were not interested in role-playing games.

“They actually had scratch-and-sniff things in the Nintendo Power magazines,” Tarsney said. “I don’t think that really correlated too much with it not selling well. I still think more the (role-playing game) thing of it was the biggest factor, just because they weren’t big in the west.

Tarsney already sold one “Earthbound” copy and, as of Thursday, had the other cartridge listed at the store for $375.