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.