Move over, fine art. Step aside, vintage wine. The true pinnacle of human civilization has apparently been achieved, and it comes in a cardboard box featuring a cheerful Italian plumber stomping on turtles.
A sealed, sticker-intact copy of the original 1985 Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System sold for a jaw-dropping $3 million at Heritage Auctions, gleefully body-slamming the previous record set back in 2021 like a certain mustachioed hero dispatching a Goomba.
But this isn’t just any shrink-wrapped relic gathering dust in someone’s basement. According to gaming journalist Chris Kohler, who reported the milestone on Bluesky, this particular cartridge is a genuinely rare beast: a sticker-sealed copy from Nintendo’s earliest production runs — the very first batch of Mario games to ever make their way into the world. It’s the first example of this specific sticker-sealed variant to ever go under the hammer at auction, which apparently makes all the difference between ‘neat old game’ and ‘costs more than a house in San Francisco.’
To put things in perspective, $3 million could buy you roughly 20 million actual plays of the original game at 1985 quarter-arcade prices. You could also fund a comfortable retirement, several college educations, or approximately 600,000 current Nintendo Switch games — all of which you could actually open and play.
But that, of course, is entirely the point. The moment someone peels that sticker, the magic evaporates faster than a Super Star power-up. This cartridge derives its entire worth from the fact that it has remained stubbornly, pristinely, defiantly unopened for four decades.
Somewhere out there, a very happy seller is heading into their own real-life castle. And unlike Mario, they definitely found the princess.
*Source: Boing Boing / Heritage Auctions*
Original story via Boing Boing
