In 2021, a sealed Super Mario Bros. cartridge bought in 1986 sold for $660,000; months later, a different sealed copy reached $2 million in a private Rally sale

A copy of Super Mario Bros. was bought as a Christmas present in late 1986 and spent 35 years at the bottom of an office desk drawer before its owner finally sold it for $660,000 in April 2021. The sealed Nintendo Entertainment System game became the most expensive video game ever sold at auction at the time, and a few months later, a different sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. changed hands privately for $2 million, which pushed the value of unopened Nintendo games into a different category altogether. Heritage Auctions recorded the $660,000 auction sale, while the later $2 million transaction was handled through Rally rather than a conventional auction.The game that stayed inside a desk drawerThe $660,000 cartridge had been purchased in late 1986 as a Christmas gift. The buyer never opened it and put it away in a desk drawer, where it remained untouched for about 35 years. The owner eventually decided to sell, with the cartridge still factory sealed. Heritage graded the game WATA 9.6 A+ and identified it as a Super Mario Bros. copy from a short production period, which had the perforated cardboard hangtab packaging and a particular code configuration that placed it within a limited production run.Heritage said that this particular version was produced in late 1986 and was among the early copies to use plastic shrink wrap rather than the earlier sticker-sealed packaging. Nintendo had moved to another packaging variation by early 1987. The cartridge was unopened after decades in storage, and its packaging corresponded to a relatively short production window. Heritage described it as the oldest factory-sealed Super Mario Bros. copy it had offered at that point.The auction record lasted only a few monthsHeritage sold the cartridge on April 4, 2021, for $660,000, and the amount included the buyer's premium and more than quadrupled the previous record for a Super Mario Bros. game, which Heritage had set at $114,000 in July 2020. In July, a sealed copy of The Legend of Zelda sold for $870,000 at Heritage, followed two days later by a sealed Super Mario 64 that reached $1.56 million. That Mario 64 sale became the first public video-game auction to cross the $1 million mark.The games were no longer being valued simply as old entertainment software, since condition, packaging variations, grading and provenance had become central to the collector market. The owner of the $660,000 Super Mario Bros. had bought it as a Christmas gift that disappeared into a desk drawer and remained there for decades. Its eventual value was determined only after collectors began paying large sums for professionally graded, unopened games.Another Mario cartridge reached $2 millionThe $2 million figure that is often associated with the 2021 Super Mario Bros. record belonged to a different copy. Rally is a platform that allowed investors to buy fractional interests in collectibles, and it acquired its sealed Super Mario Bros. cartridge for $140,000 in 2020. The company then offered shares in the game to investors, and in August 2021, those investors approved a $2 million buyout from an anonymous collector.Artnet reported that Rally had sold 3,000 shares in the game for $50 each, and the eventual $2 million transaction therefore represented a major increase over the $140,000 that Rally had paid to acquire it. However, this was not an auction unlike the $660,000 Heritage transaction, which matters because the two sales are often blended together when the 2021 video-game market is discussed. The $660,000 cartridge was bought in 1986 and sold at auction, and the $2 million cartridge was sold through Rally's fractional-ownership model.The $2 million mark eventually remained the benchmark for a Super Mario Bros. sale until 2026, when Heritage sold a different sealed copy for $3 million. That later cartridge was the highest-graded copy of an early sealed edition and became the new record for the game.Catch the latest World News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.