An EA Sports NBA video game from 2010, which you almost certainly have never heard of, let alone had the chance to play, sold for more than $10,000 on eBay over the weekend.
It’s one of the rarest sports video games in the collecting world.
The reason? It was never officially released.
NBA Elite 11 was supposed to be the successor to the NBA Live franchise and help EA compete with the growing popularity of the NBA 2K series. Announced in June 2010, EA said “NBA ELITE 11 will revolutionize the way basketball simulation games are played, with an all-new technology base, a new control scheme and a real-time physics system” and promised an October 2010 release date.
A month before the planned release, EA delayed the game.
“We set ambitious goals for NBA Elite, and we are creating a game that will introduce several breakthrough features that have been missing from the basketball genre,” the company said in a statement. “We are going to keep working until we're certain we can deliver a breakthrough basketball experience."
By November, EA said during its Q2 fiscal earnings call that the game was officially canceled, likely due to an unmanageable number of bugs and glitches. Yet, due to the last-minute timing of the cancellation, a few copies made their way out of the production facilities and into the grasps of gamers and collectors.
One infamous glitch discovered by gamers who were able to play an earlier demo version of the game featured Andrew Bynum stuck posing “like Jesus in the middle of the court,” dubbed by video game news site Kotaku “The Passion of the Bynum.”
The botched release eventually spelled doom for the NBA Live franchise, despite EA bringing the title back in 2013.
The damage had been done. NBA 2K won and the most recently planned installment, NBA Live 20, was cancelled in 2019.
Yet, the few copies to escape into the world have become major collector’s items. In July 2021, Heritage sold a display-only copy of the game (box only) for $2,520.
In 2022, a copy of the disc alone fetched nearly $7,000.
Wata has graded just five sealed copies of the game, only one of which has sold in recent years — the Wata 9.6 B+ example that sold over the weekend.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.