In another jaw-dropping example of old video games making bank, a sealed copy of Super Mario 64 has just been sold at auction for a record-breaking $1.5 million. This is only a few days removed from the previous record holder, an early-production Legend Of Zelda cartridge that made about $870,000 after an intense bidding war.
Even before that, the record for the most expensive video game sold was for an unsealed copy of the original Super Mario Bros, which carried a final price of $660,000 when it was sold at Heritage Auctions back in April. Earlier still, a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 made the record with a final price of $156,000 last November. It seems that this streak has continued for Nintendo, as a recent auction has just placed yet another Mario title as the most expensive game cartridge ever sold.
As reported by Kotaku, an unopened copy of Super Mario 64 was just sold for a whopping $1.5 million at Heritage Auctions, the same auction house where all of the previous record holders mentioned above were discovered. Said copy is said to be one of only five unopened copies of the Nintendo 64 classic, and was previously rated at 9.8 on the WataScale, which is used to measure the potential value of video game copies at auction. The bidding lasted from July 9 to today, and even before the final price was determined the Super Mario 64 cartridge was already turning heads with its starting cost of $100k.
This surprising auction comes right as Super Mario 64 reached its 25th-anniversary last month, one of the many such milestones reached by Nintendo properties in 2021. First released in 1996, Super Mario 64 brought Nintendo’s iconic plumber into 3D and has gone down in history as one of the greatest and most groundbreaking video games of all time. Even to this day, fans continue to make new ports and perform speed runs on the 64-bit platformer, with emulators even allowing players to enjoy it on a web browser - at least until Nintendo takes them down.
The final price of this sealed copy of Super Mario 64 is unbelievable enough, but the fact that this news comes so soon after the previously-held record for the most expensive video game sold at auction is truly mind-boggling. There's no telling if and when the $1.5 million price tag held by today's Super Mario 64 cartridge will be topped, but given how frequently this record seems to be broken it’s anyone’s guess what the next piece of gaming treasure will be.
Source: Kotaku
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