If you’ve got a sealed, mint copy of Super Mario Bros. lying around, you may want to list it over at Heritage Auctions for a huge potential payday. The auction site recently hosted an A+ (9.4) copy of Nintendo’s original 1985 classic, which ended yesterday at an incredible $114,000. According to Kotaku’s Chris Kohler, this is a new record for most expensive game ever sold.
A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. just sold at auction for $114,000, which is a new record for the sale of a single game. Bet the owners of the $100,000 one, which is an earlier printing, feel great today. pic.twitter.com/lVdcla8d19
— Chris Kohler (@kobunheat) July 10, 2020
Great condition aside, this copy of Super Mario Bros. is unique for having a cardboard hangtab, a relic from the bygone era of game manufacturing and retail. “Cardboard hangtabs were originally used on the US test market copies of black box games, back before plastic was used to seal each game,” explained Heritage Auctions. “There are four sub-variants of the plastic sealed cardboard hangtab box (this particular copy of Super Mario Bros. being the ‘3 Code’ variant) that were produced within the span of one year. Each sub-variant of the cardboard hangtab black box, produced within that timeframe, had a production period of just a few months; a drop in the bucket compared to the title’s overall production run.”
“In short, a cardboard hangtab copy of any early Nintendo Entertainment System game brings a certain air of “vintage” unrivaled by its successors. Super Mario Bros. was one of the launch titles for the NES console in the US, and is the highest selling game on the console of all time. It marks the first game in the Super Mario Bros. video game series, as well as the first appearance of Mario’s archnemesis, Bowser. This copy will surely serve as a centerpiece for the discerning collector, and is not one to miss out on.”