There was a sneaking suspicion sometime back that this golden Mario statuette was a Holy Grail. You see, after the Golf US tournament, it's believed that Nintendo gave out about 100 gold trophies, but no one has seen one, or at least extensive searches for them have turned up nothing.

But what we have here is something Nintendo never sold. During the Famicom era, Nintendo provided at least two sought after items to stores: the Nintendo sign (with Nintendo written in Japanese) and the gold Mario statuette. Store owners could display these items as a sort of promotion for Nintendo products -- an advertising tactic common in today's gaming stores.

The golden Mario shown here doesn't include any sort of wooden base, but it's believed that all of these statues had a small wooden base for the statue to sit on. The entire statue is very small, something that could be placed on a table top next to a cash register, for instance.

It's quiet the elegant piece for anyone's Nintendo collection and something that'll cost you about $50.