Tag: Collecting

Sealed Copy of Super Mario Bros. Sells for $114,000

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.

Nintendo PlayStation Sells at Auction for $360,000

The Sony PlayStation launched with a $300 price tag in 1995, famously undercutting Sega’s planned $400 price point for the Saturn. So it’s only fitting that in 2020, the fabled Nintendo PlayStation prototype sold at auction this afternoon with a winning bid of $300,000.

The new owner of this rare artifact is currently a mystery, but the winning bid may have been placed by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who wrote about his interest in the auction on Twitter back in February.

The Nintendo PlayStation was previously owned by Dan Diebold, who took it “around the world and back again” after his father discovered it among some “junk” that had once belonged to former Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Olaf Olafsson:

At one time, this particular unit was owned by the founder, first president, and first chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. Olaf Olafsson. Olaf eventually left Sony to join Advanta Corporation, and became its president in 1998. A little over a year later, Olaf left Advanta to join Time Warner — but he left his Nintendo PlayStation prototype behind at Advanta. Roughly around this time, Advanta filed for bankruptcy and began gathering up everything in their corporate office to sell at auction. As the story goes, the Nintendo Play Station prototype was grouped together with some miscellaneous items that were boxed up with a group lot, the contents of which were veiled. A nice Easter egg for the winning bidder, indeed!

By far, this is arguably one of the most notorious, mysterious, and controversial artifacts of the video game industry. This prototype has been around the world and back again, admired and appreciated by video game enthusiasts from all over. Even though this is the closing of this portion of its narrative, it will continue to remain a pivotal piece of video game history no matter where it ends up.

According to the auctioneers at Heritage Auctions, the purchaser of the Nintendo PlayStation will also have to pay a $60,000 “Buyer’s Premium” on top of the winning bid, bringing the total to $360,000.

UPDATE (3/7/20): Forbes is reporting that Greg McLemore, the founder of Pets.com, is the mystery man behind the winning bid in yesterday’s Nintendo PlayStation auction. McLemore is an avid collector of arcade machines, game consoles, and original artwork, and he told the publication he plans to open a permanent museum to house his collection.

The Only Known Nintendo PlayStation Prototype is Being Sold at Auction

The failed collaboration between Nintendo and Sony to produce a CD-ROM add-on for the Super NES has become the stuff of legend. The details of the falling out have been documented pretty extensively over the years, and war stories from all the major players have appeared in both David Sheff’s Game Over and Blake Harris’s Console Wars.

While we all know the story, what became of the small batch of prototype consoles produced by the two companies has always been a mystery. More than 200 Nintendo PlayStations were reportedly produced, and it’s assumed that most were destroyed, but one managed to escape the trash heap by hiding out in “a box of junk” previously owned by former Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Olaf Olafsson.

After his stint at Sony, Olafsson would take a job with Advanta Corporation, and this “box of junk” went with him, but when the financial company went bankrupt in 2009, the Nintendo PlayStation was left behind. It was found by Terry Diebold, who worked in Advanta’s maintenance department, and eventually made its way into the hands of his son, Dan.

Now, after game historians have examined and repaired the one-of-a-kind artifact, it’s going up for auction. The Diebolds are selling the prototype through Heritage Auctions, and as of this writing, the current bid is sitting at $145,000. And it’s unlikely to stop there, as proxy bids will continue to be taken until the start of the live auction on March 6.

So what will you get for your money? According to Heritage, the console features a fully-functioning Super Famicom cartridge slot:

We at Heritage can attest the prototype is working, as we’ve played a couple of rounds of Mortal Kombat on it using a Super Famicom cartridge.

The CD drive is also functional, but as no software was produced for the Nintendo PlayStation, all it can do is play music CDs:

Though the CD-ROM drive was not currently working when it was found in 2009, it has since been repaired by Benjamin Heckendorn, a YouTube personality known for his console repair videos. It now has the ability to play music CDs like the commercially produced PlayStation, but there is no proprietary software that’s known to have been made during the prototype’s development.

Heritage refers to the Nintendo PlayStation as “one of the most notorious, mysterious, and controversial artifacts of the video game industry” and it’s hard to argue with that.