Plumber left in shock after finding retro Nintendo controller in the loft after 25 years

A plumber who kept a rare gaming controller he was given for his 14th birthday in his loft for 25 years is set to sell it at auction - for £1,000.

Liam Clousdale received the Nintendo 64 pad as a birthday gift from his parents in 1998 so he could play N64 classics like Mario Kart, Goldeneye and Zelda.

But now, 25 years later, the controller has been identified as a rare special edition and potentially one of less than 200 that exist in the world.

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The Nintendo 64 Foxdata Silver Leopard customised controller could sell for a grand when it goes under the hammer at Hansons Auctioneers on October 17.

Liam, 39, from Whitefield, Greater Manchester, said: “I got the pad as a birthday gift from my parents in 1998 when I was 14. At the time my family lived in Cumbria.

“The ads for it appeared in the official Nintendo magazine, the N64 Magazine as it was known back then.

"At that time you picked stuff out of the adverts in the back pages instead of via the internet.

“The Foxdata N64 was the only console to come with four ports for pads.

"All my friends used to go to each other’s houses to play and, to avoid confusion, everyone liked to have their own unique pad.

"The Foxdata ones were amazing to me at the time as they were official pads but with custom paint jobs.

“I used it a fair amount and loved having the craziest looking pad. Though the N64 has long since been packed away, I’m still an avid gamer.

“One of my friends spotted that a Foxdata pad had sold for a decent amount of money and remembered I had one.

"He asked me about it so I unpackaged my