A factory-sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. has sold for a record-breaking $2 million, making it the most valuable video game collectible…for now.
Collectibles website Rally announced the sale on Twitter today, as reported by Polygon, and $2 million is now the highest price paid for a video game in the history of video games. However, this sale wasn't a typical video game auction sale — the anonymous buyer essentially bought the game from shareholders.
Punks, X-Men, Declarations, and some news…
🏆A NEW WORLD RECORD on Rally🏆
…w/ the $2,000,000 sale of our 1985 Super Mario Bros., marking the HIGHEST PRICE EVER PAID for a video game of any title.
Read more in todays New York Times (cc: @nytimes): https://t.co/mJzEcVMXuQ pic.twitter.com/segsfw6Jw9
— Rally (@OnRallyRd) August 6, 2021
That's because Rally is different from traditional auction sites. Rally sells shares of collectibles to investors and then when those collectibles are sold to buyers, the shareholders receive a return on their investment. So in this case, the buyer purchased the factory-sealed, limited-run print of the original Super Mario Bros. for $2 million only after the collectible's shareholders approved such a sale.
The New York Times reports that this $2 million sale saw shareholders receive a return of investment on their shares of roughly 900%. That's a lot of gold coins.
If $2 million seems like a lot of money for a single game, it is, but is this professionally graded copy of Super Mario Bros. actually worth that much money? To the buyer, it would seem the answer is yes. To the wider video game collectible community, though, that's a question up for debate.
Kotaku recently published a great report about the recent surge in video game collectible sale records, which seem to be broken every other week at this point. In it, they spoke to Deniz Kahn, the CEO of Wata Games, which is a company that specializes in video game grading. Kahn explained that there's really no telling how far collectors will go to get the highest-quality product possible.
"Attaining the finest known example from a condition standpoint drives a certain type of collector's behavior, specifically the collector who wants the absolute best," Kahn said when asked about a record-breaking $1.5 million sale of Super Mario 64. "All that being said, this price is still shocking but shows the level of emotion involved in how prices are realized in an auction scenario."
Kahn continued and said it comes down to the economics of competing buyers: if they want the finest possible collectible on their shelf bad enough, they'll compete in an auction accordingly, which often means spending record-breaking amounts of money.
This $2 million sale of a copy of Super Mario Bros. comes just a few months after a similar copy of Super Mario Bros. sold for a record-breaking $660,000. At the time of that sale, $660,000 was unheard of and as you can see, that number has been dwarfed in a matter of months.
In between that $660,000 sale and this new $2 million sale, a sealed copy of The Legend of Zelda held the record of most valuable game collectible ever for a bit after it sold for $870,000. Then, less than a week later a sealed copy of Super Mario 64 broke that record with a $1.56 million sale, which is nearly double the previous record.
This $2 million sale of Super Mario Bros. is the new record holder for now, but who knows how long that will last? Maybe a sealed copy of SSX Tricky will sell for $3 million next week — ok probably not, but if someone spent that much on SSX Tricky, could you blame them?
Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. He loves SSX Tricky and prefers to play games than spend millions on them, but he doesn't have a million dollars so what does he know. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.