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“The Thousand-Year Door” preorders came with special Gamecube slip covers
Resellers have been flipping them $50, close to the game’s price
For some reason, there are a handful of sales over $500
If you missed it, “Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door” just got its remake on the Nintendo Switch. Gamers are eager to dive back in for the first time since 2004, and sales are looking pretty good. To celebrate the new release, some game stores have been selling preorder-exclusive slipcovers for the game that feature the original Gamecube branding. These have picked up a ton of hype online, and now resellers are flipping them for $50 by themselves.
Have you played “Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door”? If not, you should give it a shot. The Paper Mario series is essentially a remix of the Super Mario IP with RPG elements and a creative, paper-cutout artstyle.
“The Thousand-Year Door” was the second game in the series, first released in 2004. It’s widely considered as one of the best games of its generation and remains a favorite to this day.
So when it was confirmed that “The Thousand-Year Door” was getting an official remake for the Nintendo Switch, people were pretty excited.
This remake was first announced back in September. All new artwork, music, and even new bosses were produced for its 2024 release. Preorders opened up through the usual spots, and gamers would only have to wait until May 23 to get into it.
Speaking of preorders, “The Thousand-Year Door” had a few different preorder bonuses depending on where people ordered. One of the most notable is a unique, Gamecube-style slipcover. Certain game stores, such as GameStop Canada and Nintendo NYC offered this to their customers.
It’s nothing too complicated as you can see. You just open the case, take the standard Switch cover out, and plop this one in. As far as preorder bonuses go, this is far from the craziest we’ve seen.
And it’s also possible to get one of these “Thousand-Year Door” Gamecube slip covers without even buying the game. Nintendo offers a PDF download of the cover through the MyNintendo platform, at the cost of 30 platinum tokens.
Okay, so let’s just recap. The game is now out, and preorder windows are all closed. If you did make a preorder through a store that offered these slipcovers, that’s all you’d get; no special content, inclusive in-game skins, no fancy posters.
You got a small piece of paper that you could swap out the other small piece of paper that came with your game. Maybe you would display it or just make your friends wonder why you’re putting a Gamecube game in your Switch.
Not only that, you can go download the PDF and print it out yourself, right now. So how much could one of these be worth anyways? Well, right now “The Thousand-Year Door” Gamecube slip covers are reselling for $50 to $100, just under the cost of the game itself.
We’re guessing most, if not all of these are for the bonafide preorder slips, not whatever version people are printing out on computer paper. The volume is pretty remarkable too. Since the game’s release, nearly 100 of these have sold through eBay.
And there’s one other weird thing we’ve noticed. A handful of these slip covers have sold for seriously ludicrous amounts. As in, $500, even over $1,000.
From what we can tell, these sales were not canceled. We’re not saying they’re legitimate, it’s probably just some resellers trying to puff up the price or some good old fashioned money laundering, but the sales are real.
All in all, this is a solid flip. Things have slowed down a lot since release, but the resellers that got in early made tons of easy profit just by mailing out a few pieces of paper.
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