A sealed copy of the NES classic Super Mario Bros. sold for an incredible $660,000 at Heritage Auctions on Friday, more than quadrupling the previous record for the most expensive game ever.
This isn’t the first time Super Mario Bros. has held the record: a mint copy of the US version of the game sold for $114,000 in July 2020 (which broke the record of $100,150 set by another copy of Super Mario Bros. in February 2019). In November, however, a different title set a new record: a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 sold for $156,000, making it the most expensive video game ever sold until today.
Here is what makes the version of Super Mario Bros. that sold today so special, according to Heritage Auctions:
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!
For more than half a million dollars, I hope the buyer finds it a worthy purchase.