Category: Free Play

I am endlessly fascinated by the people who spend obscene amounts of money on retro video games. Especially because it wasn’t all that long ago that game shops weren’t even interested in games for “obsolete” consoles like the NES or the Atari 2600.

At the time, my pristine used copy of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! might have fetched a few dollars at a garage sale. However, in today’s market, a CIB (that’s “Complete In Box”) copy of the game can net you more than $1,000. But even that’s chump change compared to a game sale that just closed at Heritage Auctions. According to the auction house, some unnamed person is now the proud owner of a sealed and graded copy of Super Mario Bros.

And all it cost them was… wait for it… $660,000.

That puts it well beyond the previous record-setting price paid for a single game (a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 that sold in November for $156,000), as well an earlier sale of Super Mario’s first NES adventure that went for $140,000. It’s also more than double the $300,000 that Pets.com founder Greg McLemore paid for the Nintendo PlayStation prototype in March 2020.

This copy of Super Mario Bros. was graded 9.4 A+ by Wata Games and comes from the title’s fourth printing, which is notable for its lack of the “Game Pak NES-GP” code. It’s also missing the trademark symbol that would be added to the right of the “Nintendo Entertainment System” branding on later printings:

Not only is this the finest plastic-sealed copy with a perforated cardboard hangtab we’ve ever offered of any black box title, it is also the oldest sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. we’ve ever had the opportunity to offer. This is only the fourth version of Super Mario Bros. ever produced, and its window of production was remarkably short.

Just to paint a better picture of how short this really was — the nationwide release for the console came in mid to late 1986, and black box games distributed for that release did not have the “Game Pak NES-GP” code. It’s worth mentioning that Nintendo managed to add the trademark symbol to the Nintendo Entertainment System on their game boxes by the beginning of 1987. That certainly doesn’t leave much time at all for this variant to be produced in-between the two!

Retro game collecting is certainly going to some wild places, and it’s probably only a matter of time until somebody ponies up more than a million dollars for a single game.

Just last month, Heritage Auctions sold a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for $114,000, which set a new record for the sale price of a single game. But what we didn’t know was that another sealed copy of the game had already been sold for $140,000 in a private sale a month before that.

According to Ars Technica, that particular copy of Super Mario Bros. was purchased by Rally, a company that calls itself a “stock market of collectibles,” and what they plan to do with their new acquisition sounds wild.

Beginning next Friday, August 21, Rally will sell 3,000 “shares” in their copy of Super Mario Bros. for $50 apiece (which will raise the valuation of the game to $150,000). Like a publicly-traded stock, users can buy and sell those shares on the site’s marketplace, or cash out when an advisory board decides to sell the game to a collector.

In addition to the factory seal, this copy of Super Mario Bros. is nearly pristine, and has received a 9.8 A+ from Wata Games:

Still, Wata Games says this is one of only 14 factory-sealed copies of Super Mario Bros. it has seen among the so-called “hangtab” editions, which feature a hanger slot on the back that was removed from production lines around September 1987. Among that rarefied group, Wata says this is the “single highest graded sealed copy” it has seen, earning a 9.8/10 for box quality and a near-perfect A+ for the shrinkwrap seal on Wata’s scale.

“This is the first time that such an early print with a grade of 9.8 A+ has ever been offered for sale,” Wata Games President Deniz Kahn said in a statement. “This is the 1-of-1 highest graded copy of Super Mario Bros. in existence, considered by many collectors to be the ‘Holy Grail’ of the hobby. It’s the Action Comics #1 of video games.”

This is Rally’s first foray into purchasing collectible video games, but they’re excited for the chance to branch out from their previous focus on acquiring rare trading cards, watches, cars, and comic books.

“Over the last year or so we’ve heard from our members and have observed the industry grow, and it’s clear that there is a community that believes in both the financial and emotional value of these games and wants access to invest in them,” [Rally VP of Operations Fitz] Tepper told Ars Technica. “We’ve seen this demand from asset classes already on the platform, like sports memorabilia, trading cards, or collector cars and are now thrilled to add video games to that list.”

Tepper went on to say that this is just the first video game purchase Rally plans to make, and that the company is currently looking to obtain copies of The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. 3, Stadium Events, GoldenEye 007, and Halo: Combat Evolved as well.

Heritage Auctions announced that a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. was sold last week for $114,000, setting a new record for the sale price of a single game. The previous recordholder was a different mint condition copy of Mario’s first NES adventure, which sold for $100,150 in a private sale in early 2019.

So what makes this copy of Super Mario Bros. so valuable? According to the auction house, it comes down to the packaging’s 9.4 A+ grade from Wata Games and an equally rare “cardboard hangtab” (similar to those found on action figures) that was perforated onto the box by Nintendo:

What’s the deal with cardboard hangtabs? one may, understandably, wonder. Cardboard hangtabs were originally used on the US test market copies of black box games, back before plastic was used to seal each game. As Nintendo began to further establish their company in the US, their packaging was updated almost continuously. Strangely, the addition of the plastic wrap came before the box cutting die was altered to remove the cardboard hangtab. This rendered the functionality of the cardboard hangtab completely useless, since it was under the plastic seal. There are four sub-variants of the plastic sealed cardboard hangtab box (this particular copy of Super Mario Bros. being the “3 Code” variant) that were produced within the span of one year. Each sub-variant of the cardboard hangtab black box, produced within that timeframe, had a production period of just a few months; a drop in the bucket compared to the title’s overall production run.

In short, a cardboard hangtab copy of any early Nintendo Entertainment System game brings a certain air of “vintage” unrivaled by its successors.

Valarie McLeckie, the Video Game Specialist at Heritage Auctions, later told Ars Technica that this particular variant of Super Mario Bros. is believed to exist “in the single digits” today.

While this rare copy of Super Mario Bros. is sought-after by collectors for its uniqueness, fans interested in playing the game have several cheaper options. In addition to the millions of open copies of the NES original that exist in the wild, Super Mario Bros. has been re-released on the Super NES (as part of Super Mario All-Stars), Game Boy Color (as Super Mario Bros. Deluxe), Game Boy Advance, 3DS, Wii, Wii U, and the NES Classic. Super Mario Bros. is also part of the Nintendo Entertainment System compilation on the Nintendo Switch, which is a free download for all subscribers to the Nintendo Switch Online service.