Overview
- The Heritage Auctions lot closed Saturday with a sealed Super Mario Bros. graded 9.6 A++ selling for $3 million, which the house and outlets reported as the most expensive video game sale on record.
- Heritage described the cartridge as a second production-run example sealed with Nintendo’s gloss-sticker format, a short-lived packaging method that left box surfaces exposed and makes intact sealed copies exceptionally rare.
- A separate sealed Super Mario Bros. in the same sale, graded 9.8 A+ but from a later fourth printing with an original hangtab, sold for $575,000, showing how print run and packaging outweigh small numerical grade differences.
- Collectors and investors are driving rapidly rising prices for sealed, high-grade vintage games because professional numeric grades and distinctive packaging formats create clear scarcity signals that wealthy buyers value.
- The sale follows earlier record jumps — a $660,000 Super Mario Bros. in 2021, a $1.56 million Super Mario 64, and a $2 million Super Mario Bros. — and it could intensify scrutiny of grading firms and fuel further speculative buying in the retro-game market.