A rare N64 controller is set to sell for around £1000 after its owner found the item in his attic after being gifted the now hard-to-find Foxdata N64 pad on their fourteenth birthday.

It's one of four designs issued by Foxdata in the late 1990s, which included controllers called Desert Storm, Red Rain, Purple Forest, and Chrome Leopard.

Liam Clousdale – who had the latter Leopard variant – said he'd asked for the distinctive controller so that when he went to his friends' homes to play, "everyone liked to have their own unique pad [...] to avoid confusion".

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"The Foxdata ones were amazing to me at the time as they were official pads but with custom paint jobs," Clousdale told the Manchester Evening News. "I used it a fair amount and loved having the craziest-looking pad. Though the N64 has long since been packed away, I'm still an avid gamer.

"One of my friends spotted that a Foxdata pad had sold for a decent amount of money and remembered I had one. He asked me about it, so I unpackaged my old pad from a box in the loft where it had been carefully stored away. I then contacted [an auction house] as I found an article about a previous gaming sale they had held.

Finally finished my set of Foxdata Controllers! (Desert Storm, Chrome Leopard, Red Rain, and Purple Forest) byu/GamerAhmer inn64To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings

"I was very surprised by how much it was potentially worth. I'm happy to pass it on to a proper retro collector," he added.

Head of Hansons' Toys and Video Games Auction David Wilson-Turner reckons this range of controllers has "become increasingly sought after in the video game market".

"Though information is limited, it's believed Foxdata produced around 800 of these customised controllers across the four designs, meaning there could be less than 200 examples of Liam's controller in the world."

If you fancy one yourself, someone's trying their luck and selling theirs on eBay for €2000.