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From the front, there is little to distinguish this box from millions of others that Nintendo produced for Super Mario Bros.
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The intact seal and the suspended tab, and the “NES-GP” near the bottom, help to explain why this copy is charging such a high price.
For a while, we have seen the first sealed copies of Super Mario Bros. reached six-figure prices at auction, starting with a $ 100,000 copy sold in 2019 and continuing up to a $ 140,000 sale last year. These previous sales seem downright cheap now, however, as bidding on another Super Mario Bros. has already reached $ 372,000 in Heritage auctions.
That price comes after 13 advance proxy offers, made before four days of live bidding for a large batch of comic books and memorabilia games scheduled to start on April 1st. The offer also includes a 20 percent “buyer’s premium” that will go to Heritage auctions himself and not the current owner of the game.
Early provenance, excellent condition
Unlike some previous high-priced Super Mario Bros. sales, this copy is not from the first production of the game, which had a sealed box with only a small sticker and was only sold in New York City during the NES market test in late 1985. But this copy is one of the first wrapped in plastic editions of the game, sold for only a short time in late 1986, according to the WATA Games guide. This copy also received an incredible 9.6 out of 10 on the WATA Games quality scale, with an “exceptional” A + seal in “almost perfect” conditions. He also still has an intact hangtab, which means he never had his seal pierced to hang it in a store window. To place the current Super Mario Bros. contextual pricing, the only known prototype of the unproduced Nintendo PlayStation – a unique and important part of video game history – sold a year ago for $ 380,000 (with buyer’s premium included). And in 2014, a “largest in the world” collection of 11,000 video games was sold for $ 750,000.
Although this is the oldest copy of the Super Mario Bros. Heritage has auctioned so far, others may still exist among the millions and millions of copies of Super Mario Bros. already produced. Then again, Heritage Auctions video game expert and director of consignment, Valarie McLeckie, told Ars Technica last July: “I suspect that sealed copies of cardboard [still available today] single digit number. “
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The chief appraiser of Wata Games examines a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. (from a printing much later than this record sale).
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The classifier looks through a jeweler’s magnifying glass to identify any signs of sealing, restoration, touch of color or tampering.
Wata Games
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Check the authenticity of the seal and the box.
Wata Games
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Yes, the box has a back. That checks.
Wata Games
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The rating tags from Wata Games are ready to be placed on your banners before the games are encapsulated.
Wata Games
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Put a label banner in place as part of the packaging process.
Wata Games
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Finally, the game is safe from damage from routine handling (and any chance of actually being opened and played soon).
Wata Games
The current bid in this sealed box far exceeds the sales record for a single video game. This honor goes to a rare, sealed Super Mario Bros. 3 variant with “Bros.” part of the logo positioned on the left, which sold for $ 156,000 in November.
Nintendo’s classic sealed cartridges are in high demand elsewhere in current Heritage auctions. An early sealed copy of Mega Man for the NES (which mistakenly identifies the series villain as “Dr. Wright”) a bid of up to $ 90,000 has already been offered. Meanwhile, a sealed copy of one of the first editions produced in Pokémon Red for Game Boy attracted a bid of $ 60,000.
“I fully believe that [games] they are a form of collection as respectable as comics, ”McLeckie told Ars last year. “We have just started to dive into the formalization of this market. In general, people are just beginning to tune in to the fact that there is a rarity-based system involved. “
“If video games follow the path of comics and coins, then there will one day be a million dollar video game sale, and I think [Super Mario Bros.] it’s that game if it’s going to happen, “WATA Games CEO Deniz Kahn told Ars in 2019.