A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System sold at auction on Friday for $3 million. Heritage Auctions, which handled the sale, called it "the most significant video game ever offered at auction."
The copy is a second-production cartridge that spent the last 40 years sitting untouched inside its original box, according to Engadget. It was bundled with a launch edition NES Control Deck console, and both the game and the console remained in their original packaging with the plastic still intact.
What separated this copy from other sealed versions of the same game was its sticker seal. In 1986, Nintendo briefly introduced a glossy sticker to seal its game cartridges before switching to shrink-wrap. Because sticker-sealed copies were not protected by plastic the way shrink-wrapped games were, finding one in good condition decades after its release is exceptionally rare.
Only three second-production copies with the gloss sticker format are known to exist. This one was graded PSA 9.6 A++, making it the best-preserved of the three. Heritage Auctions noted in its listing that "this specific variant has never appeared in a public auction in sealed condition, underscoring just how elusive it is."
The game and console are from the Los Angeles test market era, during the early period of Nintendo's expansion into the United States. Heritage Auctions wrote in the listing that the item "represents the closest a collector can come to owning the very moment Super Mario Bros. transformed console video games from a struggling novelty into a permanent part of cultural history."
The $3 million sale places the item among the most expensive video game sales ever recorded. Collectors and auction houses have seen prices for rare sealed games rise sharply over the past several years, driven by growing interest in early gaming history and the scarcity of surviving examples in top condition.
The identity of the buyer was not reported.
