Retro video game prices have skyrocketed over the past decade. Games for console classics like the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) are now a good investment. There’s a new leader in the world’s most valuable video games!
When a copy of “Super Mario Bros.” for the NES was auctioned for 114,000 US dollars in July 2020, TECHBOOK already predicted that the million mark would sooner or later be broken. This happened in the summer of 2021. A short time later even the two million dollar mark fell. Not at an auction this time.
1st place: “Super Mario Bros.” for 2 million US dollars
A copy of the NES classic Super Mario Bros sold for $2 million in August 2021, according to the “New York Timesreported. An anonymous buyer transferred the amount for the video game to the company “Rally”. This buys valuable collectibles and enables private individuals to buy shares in them. If an offer comes in for one of the collectibles, the owners decide whether to sell it. In 2020, they turned down an offer of $300,000 for Super Mario Bros. At 2 million they were selling now.
This is an unopened, sealed copy of the 1985 video game milestone.
2nd place: “Super Mario 64” clearly breaks the million mark
That was fast! Just two days after a copy of The Legend of Zelda fetched $870,000 at auction and set a new world record, it has been broken again. This time from a game for the Nintendo 64. A sealed copy of “Super Mario 64” in near-perfect condition from 1996 broke the million mark for the first time – and by a wide margin. The game brought in 1,560,000 US dollars (around 1,310,000 euros) at an auction by Heritage Auctions, as the auction house announced. This is apparently not some kind of special edition, but actually the freely available game from the 90s in the US version. Also amazing: So far, games for the NES, which is a few years older, have always achieved record sums.
“Super Mario 64” was the first game in which Nintendo’s plumber jumped through the game world in 3D. At the same time it was the best-selling game for the N64.
3rd place: “The Legend of Zelda” for 870,000 US dollars
The auction house Heritage Auctions auctioned off the NES game The Legend of Zelda on July 9, 2021 for a whopping $870,000. The game dates from 1987 and is still sealed. According to the auction house, the condition is practically brand new. What a sum for a single video game! Like “Super Mario Bros.”, “The Legend of Zelda” is one of the absolute classic games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, NES for short. What makes the game special, aside from its condition, is the fact that this is one of the earliest productions. It was only produced for a few months in the late 1987s before being replaced by another version starting in 1988.
4th place: “Super Mario Bros.” for $ 660,000
The NES game “Super Mario Bros.” also went over the auction table in 2021 for an enormous sum. In April, it was auctioned for $660,000. The jump ‘n’ run game even celebrated its 35th anniversary in Europe in the same year and sold a total of over 40 million copies worldwide. But how can a game owned and still owned by millions of people fetch $660,000 at auction? This is an original sealed copy of the game in near pristine condition. The packaging type was also only used for a short time, making the game that much rarer.
The story behind finding the game is curious. The game was bought for Christmas in 1986 but left in a drawer. There it lay over the years and matured into an absolute jewel. Incidentally, it is not known who bought the game.
5th place: “Super Mario Bros. 3” for $156,000
Another Super Mario Bros. went under the hammer at an auction in the US for $156,000. This was confirmed by the responsible auction house in Dallas, Heritage Auctionsback then – by the way, also the same auction house as for the current record.
Super Mario Bros. 3 was released for the NES in the USA in early 1990 and is also considered a milestone in video game history. The Jump’n’Run about the animated plumber Mario sold over 17 million copies. It is the best-selling video game not sold with a console. The auctioned copy is the first production series, which is only available in small numbers. The game is also still sealed and the condition is therefore as good as perfect.
Even then, the game increased in value enormously. The move from $100,150 to $114,000 was notable. But years later, Super Mario Bros. 3 and the new copy of Super Mario Bros. broke the record by a mile!
The retro market is booming
Whether Nintendo, Sony, Atari or Sega – everything is collected. The main thing is that the video games, consoles and accessories are old and rare. Old games are already fetching top prices on Ebay and the trend continues year after year. Not only well-known consoles like Super Nintendo or the Atari 2600 are popular collectibles. Flopped and therefore rare devices like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, a failed foray into the VR world in 1995, are also on the wish lists of retro enthusiasts. The latter is sold at auctions for several hundred euros over the virtual counter.
Collectors not only fall for cassettes, discs and hardware, but also for the associated cardboard slipcases and packaging. For example, Nintendo only started using plastic cases when the Gamecube appeared in 2001. Before there was cardboard packaging, which many ended up in the garbage or in the corner with little care. This is exactly what makes them rare and therefore valuable. So if you still have the original cardboard packaging in good condition for a rare game, you will achieve a much higher selling price. It only gets even more interesting if they are also originally sealed and have therefore never been opened.
TECHBOOK editor-in-chief Andreas Filbig also owns a few old NES games and a console. In the following video he showed some treasures:
Also popular with fans are promotional copies, test devices for dealers, prototypes and other games and consoles that never ended up on the open market. These easily achieve revenues in the four or even five-digit euro range. This also applies to the long-time most valuable game in the world, Nintendo World Championship, which was distributed to the winners in a competition in 1990 in a quantity of 26. That was worth 100,088 US dollars (equivalent to around 88,800 euros) to a buyer.