Mattel Football (Clear prototype)

This is a fairly rare version of Mattel's Football game, obviously not intended for public sale. Mattel produced a small number of the games in a clear shell so you could see the inside of the game. These would have been used on show floors at events like Toy Fair, and other places where they wanted to show off the game to potential buyers. This actually is a common practice, I have a couple of other games from other manufacturers that are in clear shells, and Apple has been known to do it to their computers and laptops back in the early Macintosh days.

To date, I have seen about 6 of these, and 3 Mattel Auto Race games made the same way. I'm not sure if any others were done like this. I have also seen one Bowling game with the entire bowling lane in clear plastic so you can see how the mechanism inside works. As you can see, the battery cover should also be clear, and some of them have the 'PRO 1', 'OFF' and 'PRO 2' painted black to make them more readable (but I've seen them without any paint on them as well). These may have been shipped to Mattel in boxes (although I doubt it), but anytime I see these in a box, it's just a normal retail box, so don't judge the condition of the packaging if trying to estimate its value.

So far the most expensive one I've seen sell was for $700 (nice condition with the clear battery cover)... I'd probably value the game between $500-1000 depending on completeness (i.e., clear battery cover) and condition. Box condition doesn't matter as you can always replace it.