'Mega-rare' Atari game sells for more than $33,000

A copy of Air Raid, which is regarded as the rarest Atari 2600 game, sold for $33,433.30 on video game auction site GameGavel yesterday.

The game's owner, Harv Bennett, recently told Polygon that it had been sitting in storage for about two decades, until he and his daughter unearthed it last month. Bennett had opened this particular copy a total of five times and played it, but the box itself was intact, including the instruction manual — the first one known to survive to the present day.

Another copy of Air Raid sold for $31,600 on eBay in 2010. According to this auction's bid history, the listing sat at just over $17,000 until just before the close of the auction at 10 p.m. ET yesterday, when a last-minute bid brought the listing up to its final sale price.

Bennett told Polygon that he plans to give most of the proceeds from the auction to his daughter, who recently bought "a real fixer-upper" of a house.