An early, sticker-sealed copy of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. sold for $3m at auction today, stomping the record set in 2021. Chris Kohler writes on Bluesky that it's the first sticker-sealed copy (from Nintendo's earliest production runs) to go under the hammer. Until now, private auctions featured only the shrinkwrapped copies manufactured after 1985.
The ancient NES cart was graded 9.6 by PSA and part of an ongoing Heritage Live lot that has so far fetched $4.8m. Heritage also auctioned the previous record-setting Super Mario Bros. auction—a relatively paltry $660,000 in 2021.
Retrogames have long been an auctioneering staple but the prices being fetched are soaring. Long gone are the days when it was news for a rare title to ring up $13,105 on eBay. In 2012, our field guide to costly rarities, assembled with historian Frank Cifaldi, suggested that a $55,000 sale of a prototype cartridge of Legend of Zelda represented a collector bubble. By 2019, an unopened copy of 1987's Kid Icarus was an easy $10k. By 2024, an unboxed, label-less gold Nintendo World Championships cartridge fetched $207,400.
As for Mario, he's having a moment: the poorly-reviewed but widely-seen sequel to The Super Mario Bros. Movie just crossed the $1bn worldwide box office threshold.
Below follows Heritage Auction's blurb for the lot:
Our latest Signature Auction is one for the ages, bringing together some of the most important and elusive treasures in video game collecting history, led by the most significant video game collectible in existence. We're offering an extraordinary copy of Super Mario Bros., a PSA 9.6 A++ sealed example with the coveted Gloss Sticker seal—identifying it as a second-production copy and the earliest confirmed sealed version of the iconic platformer that revolutionized the medium. Its rarity is staggering; it is the highest-graded of just three known sealed copies of this variant, and this variant has never appeared in a public auction in sealed condition. Even apart from the incredible copy of Super Mario Bros., which is already garnering attention from media outlets across the nation, this is our strongest offering of rare sealed NES Black Box titles in our more than seven years of auctioning video games. This group includes exceptionally scarce hangtab copies of Donkey Kong Jr., Excitebike, Gumshoe, Mario Bros., Slalom, and Wrecking Crew, titles that are seldom encountered in sealed condition. Featuring a cardboard hangtab on the back of the box, this early packaging style was discontinued in the United States in mid-1987, helping make sealed examples notoriously difficult to find. Also among the NES highlights is a mind-blowing PSA 9.6 A+ first production copy of The Legend of Zelda, one of the greatest, most influential games ever published. It is the highest-graded example of this variant ever offered at public auction, further underscoring the strength of this event's top-tier Nintendo offerings. While the centerpiece of this Signature auction is the amazing lineup of early, rare, and high-grade NES games, it is rounded out with a selection of standout titles across multiple platforms, including sought-after SNES RPGs, rarely seen Game Boy releases such as Alien 3 and Mega Man IV, a range of Pokémon titles, limited edition sports games for the Sega Genesis, an impressive selection of high-grade Sega Saturn titles, and several notable computer games, including Tomb Raider in its original trapezoid box and The Simpsons Arcade Game for the Commodore 64. Come for the history-making copies of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda; stay for what promises to be one of the most talked-about video game auctions the hobby has ever seen.
