A rare Nintendo 64 Foxdata Chrome Leopard controller has been valued at around £1,000.

It is set to fetch the sum after a man in Manchester unearthed it from his loft.

The Foxdata set of designs included Desert Storm, Red Rain, Purple Forest and Chrome Leopard and were released in the late ’90s.

Liam Clousdale received the special controller for his 14th birthday and it remained in storage for nearly 30 years.

He told the Manchester Evening News: “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.”

“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.

“I was very surprised by how much it was potentially worth. I’m happy to pass it on to a proper retro collector,” concluded Clousdale.

Liam added the Foxdata Nintendo 64 was the only one that featured four ports for controllers.

To ensure he and his friends weren’t picking up the wrong controller, he used the Chrome Leopard controller – and said he “loved having the craziest looking pad”.

It was only when one of his pals spotted that another Foxdata controller had been sold at auction that Liam thought to dig his old one from the attic.

He found after a chat with the head of Hansons’ Toys and Video Games Auction the controller was worth a small fortune due to the rarity of its design.

Hansons’ David Wilson-Turner said about the Foxdata set: “That range that has become increasingly sought after in the video game market.

“Though information is limited, it’s believed Foxdata produced around 800 of these customised controllers across the four designs, meaning there could be less than 200 examples of Liam’s controller in the world.”