It’s been a big week for Pokemon fans as the franchise celebrates its 30th anniversary. In the lead-up to this year’s Pokemon Day, The Pokemon Company treated fans to a few early announcements. And on February 27th, we got our first look at Gen 10, including our trio of new starters. But along with the official celebrations and news, plenty of local comic stores and big outlets are celebrating Pokemon’s birthday, too. And that includes some big auctions full of rare and limited collectibles from series history.
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In celebration of Pokemon Day, big auction hubs like eBay and Goldin hosted special sales featuring rare items from series history. And while bidding on the Pokemon 151 collection at Goldin runs through March 8th, its 2026 Winter Pop Culture auction has already delivered us a new sales record for Pokemon collectibles. Specifically, a graded copy of 2001 Game Boy Color game Pokemon Crystal has sold for a record high price.
Pokemon Crystal Hits New All-Time Highest Resale Price
Released in 2001 as a follow-up to Pokemon Gold and Silver, Pokemon Crystal marks an important place in Pokemon history. It was the first game to allow players to choose a female protagonist avatar instead of defaulting to a boy in a hat. As a young female gamer, I can still remember how excited I was to realize I could pick a little pixel avatar that felt a little more like me. All these years later, Pokemon Crystal remains a favorite gaming experience. But like many early Pokemon games, its lack of modern re-release means that a copy of Pokemon Crystal is going to cost you.
On the resale market, a standard playable copy of Pokemon Crystal will typically go for at least $150 or more. But as a collectible that’s sealed and graded, the game’s price goes up pretty quickly. And therein lies the record-breaking potential for this 25-year-old game. A sealed, PSA 9.8 copy of Pokemon Crystal was recently up for auction at Goldin as part of its Winter 2026 Pop Culture auction. And it sold for the all-time highest price the game has ever seen, according to Goldin. The sale closed at a staggering $73,244, quite above and beyond typical graded sales of around $13,000 on average.
Rare sealed and graded copies like this will likely always fetch a premium price. But with any luck, it’ll soon be easier to replay older Pkoemon games like this. With Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen now available on the Nintendo Switch, we could see games like Pokemon Crystal re-released for more reasonable prices soon enough. This could even drive down the cost of physical copies in the future. This hasn’t happened for Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen just yet, but the games did only just re-release for Switch. So, we’ll have to see what happens over time.
At any rate, the collectible market for all things Pokemon continues to break records. With plenty of big Pokemon 30th anniversary sales ongoing, I won’t be surprised if we see a shakeup in the highest-ever sales for a few rare cards in the coming weeks, too.
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