A rare unopened Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) has been purchased by an anonymous buyer for a whopping $2 million, setting a new world record for the most expensive video game ever sold. The sale broke the record set last July, when a 25-year-old copy of Super Mario 64 went for $1.56 million at an auction.
While the previous record was set on an auction site (Heritage Auctions), the 1985 factory-sealed and professionally graded Super Mario Bros. game was sold via Rally, a collectibles website that buys games and other collectibles like comic books, cards, and cars and turns them into small companies that people can purchase shares in, pretty much like an investment. When someone makes an offer to buy a certain collectible, shareholders vote on whether or not to accept the offer and divide the profits.
Punks, X-Men, Declarations, and some news…
?A NEW WORLD RECORD on Rally?
…w/ the $2,000,000 sale of our 1985 Super Mario Bros., marking the HIGHEST PRICE EVER PAID for a video game of any title.
Read more in todays New York Times (cc: @nytimes): https://t.co/mJzEcVMXuQ pic.twitter.com/segsfw6Jw9
— Rally (@OnRallyRd) August 6, 2021
According to the New York Times, Rally bought the Super Mario Bros. game for $140,000 in April and investors passed on a $300,000 offer later that year. One graduate student, who invested $100 in shares, told the newspaper that he made $950 from the sale.
As the demand for childhood collectibles remains hot, the record for the most expensive video game has been broken several times over the past year. A copy of Super Mario Bros. went for $114,000 at an auction in July 2020. Four months later, a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 broke that record after it was sold for $156,000. That record was then shattered in April of this year when a copy of Super Mario Bros. went for $660,000 at auction. This was followed by the sale of a copy of The Legend of Zelda for $870,000.