Super Mario Bros set a new record and sold at auction for as much as $ 660,000

You read that right, someone paid $ 660,000 for the game. Just one game.

Retro games have always been expensive, especially those from NES and SNES. If they are perfectly preserved, the prices skyrocket and reach several thousand dollars. The rarest and most valuable ones are often sent for conservation assessment, and the most popular and recognized among service providers are VGA and WATA.

The latter has been experiencing a real explosion of popularity and great media attention for the last year thanks to the high amounts of games sold with their labels.

For years, the NES game Stadium Events broke price records and prices ranging from a few thousand dollars for a preserved copy to tens of thousands for a packaged copy. But Super Mario Bros is a new player in the neighborhood determined to break all records and set some unattainable ones.

A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. just sold at auction for $114,000, which is a new record for the sale of a single game. Bet the owners of the $100,000 one, which is an earlier printing, feel great today. pic.twitter.com/lVdcla8d19

— Chris Kohler (@kobunheat) July 10, 2020

Last June, one copy reached a price of $ 114,000. In support of the price is the fact that it was an extremely rare edition of the outer box that was sold in the United States for only a few months. The high price was helped by the fact that the box and cellophane received almost maximum ratings for perfect preservation.

The new record holder is the same game, an identically rare release, but this time it sold at a Heritage auction for a staggering $ 660,000. As many as 13 customers competed with each other for this truly rare gem of Nintendo’s history. The background story of the game is also shocking. The original owner bought the game in 1986 as a Christmas present, put it in a drawer, and "forgot about it". It was forgotten in the drawer for 36 years and fortunately remained perfectly preserved.

But despite the real rarity of the game, $ 660,000 is truly an exorbitant amount, even for the most avid fans of collecting graded rarities. To put this price into value perspective, the only known copy of the Nintendo PlayStation console prototype was sold last summer for just $ 360,000. If we go back a little further, in 2014 the then-largest gaming collection of over 11,000 games and consoles was sold for $ 750,000.