Do you happen to have a few million lying around in your attic?

No time? blue News summarizes for you

• A sealed “Super Mario Bros.” cartridge from the ’80s was auctioned off last week for $3 million. That’s the highest price ever paid for a video game.
• It’s not the game itself that’s worth millions, but its pristine condition, top-tier rating, and early production run.
• Behind the price surge from $114,000 to $3 million in five years lies speculation rather than nostalgia.

Summary created with

Sometime in 1986, someone in the U.S. bought a video game as a Christmas gift, never unwrapped it, and shoved it into a desk drawer. There it lay for over three decades. Untouched, forgotten, a piece of cardboard and plastic among old receipts. When the cartridge resurfaced in 2021, it fetched $660,000 at auction—a good half a million Swiss francs. The former owner, according to the Heritage auction house, never gave it a second thought.

Beware of phishing

"GTA 6" is coming in November—the scammers are already here

And last week, things got even crazier. A sealed “Super Mario Bros.” from an NES package that had remained unopened for nearly 40 years changed hands for $3 million. It’s the highest price ever paid for a video game. By now, at the very least, your gaze is inevitably drifting upward toward the attic. Is there perhaps a small fortune lying there, gathering dust between the ski gear and the Christmas decorations?

Super Mario is far more than just a video game character.

Heritage

The catch is in the sticker

Before you grab the ladder, here’s the sobering truth: “Super Mario Bros.” is pretty much the opposite of a rare game. It sold around 40 million copies. It came bundled with every Nintendo console for years. Almost everyone who owned a Nintendo console in the ’80s had a copy. You can pick up a loose, used cartridge at a thrift store or on Ricardo for 20 to 30 francs. That’s not going to change.

What sets the million-copy editions apart from your attic find isn’t the game itself, but its condition. It must be factory-sealed, graded with a top rating by a certification service like Wata or PSA, and come from one of the very first production runs. The 3-million-copy cassette, for example, bears a glossy sticker as a seal, which Nintendo used only in early 1986 before shrink wrap was introduced. It is precisely this sticker that makes the copy so valuable.

From $114,000 to $3 million in five years

But the real focus of this story isn’t a single sale, but the speed at which it happened. As recently as July 2020, a “Super Mario Bros.” selling for $114,000 was considered a spectacular record. A year later, “Super Mario 64” of all games became the first ever to break the million-dollar mark. Weeks earlier, an early “Legend of Zelda” had sold for $870,000, the only non-Mario game in the absolute top tier.

"007 First Light" in the test

Do you miss James Bond? Now there's no reason to

If you trace the curve, you see a price ladder that has increased twentyfold in five years. And it almost always features the same plumber in overalls. Mario is king, Zelda is queen. Rarer but lesser-known titles in top condition hardly interest the wealthy collectors. They don’t pay for rarity alone, but for the familiar name.

When the children’s game became an asset class

However, the actual turning point was not marked by a collector, but by a financial platform. The previous record holder wasn’t even auctioned off. The platform Rally had purchased the cartridge in 2020 for around $140,000, divided it into shares, and sold them to investors, who then voted by majority on every purchase offer.

A children’s game thus became a tradable asset, somewhere between a gold bar and an Apple share. The shareholders rejected a $300,000 offer and waited for more—with success. That is the uncomfortable punchline of the whole boom. This is no longer about nostalgia, but about speculation, fueled by the same pandemic money that also drove up the prices of cryptocurrencies and trading cards.