How Many Millions Would You Pay for Super Mario?

How Many Millions Would You Pay for Super Mario?

Now do the currency conversion to gold coins.

This week’s gaming news hasn’t brought much good with it. More studios on the brink of closure. More generative A.I. features being crammed into games, whether or not anyone besides layoff-focused executives finds that concept appealing. But at least the news got least weird, thanks to a single copy of Super Mario Bros. for NES selling for a remarkable three million dollars at auction. Three million! That’s almost enough money to buy a full tank of gas.

Seriously, though, three million bucks sets a brand-new video game auction record. Remember when people freaked out because unbelievably rare games like Stadium Events for NES and Air Raid for Atari 2600 sold for tens of thousands of dollars? Games that are almost impossibly difficult to find and, in Air Raid’s case, may have been produced in single-digit quantities? Meanwhile, there were something like 14 million copies of Super Mario Bros. put into circulation back in the day, which makes it very much not a rare game. According to Heritage Auctions, the site that hosted the sale, this particular copy of Super Mario Bros. is in truly rare condition and deserves such an enormous price... but then, Heritage Auction undoubtedly collected an enormous fee on the auction, so they would say that.

The face of a man who knows his true worth.

Still, this has been the shape of things for a while now. Truly rare items do fetch hefty prices, but single specimens of highly prominent mass-market hits in impeccable condition drive impossibly steep sales that catch headlines and leave tongues wagging about how this is all probably some sort of money-laundering scheme. That trend appears to have found its focus in key Nintendo titles—generally Mario and Zelda—most likely because Nintendo titles have the most enduring legacy. There’s an unbroken line of continuity from the original Super Mario Bros. to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, something unique in gaming. Nintendo has been manufacturing consoles for more than 40 years now, and the company has parlayed its long history of games successfully into some of the biggest animated movies of all time. Nintendo characters (especially silver screen star Mario) have mass recognition on par with Pac-Man.

Unlike arcade mainstay Pac-Man, though, Mario’s biggest and most impactful games have happened on consoles. That makes a difference. It means that you can point to a single Mario cartridge (the auction millionaire cohort appears to have settled on either Super Mario Bros. or Super Mario 64) and say, “This is it: the physical embodiment of one of the most important accomplishments in video game history.” Sure, you could probably do the same with, say, a “Puck-Man" cabinet of Pac-Man, but it’s a whole lot less likely. For one, good luck finding a “perfect sealed Puck-Man Pac-Man” to sell. Console games are tiny and easy to pack away in a box of other stuff that you forget for 30 years, but no one is going to randomly stumble across an unopened complete-in-crate arcade cabinet from 1980 collecting dust in their attic. And not a lot of kids unwrapped a brand new Pac-Man cabinet on Christmas morning, so you don’t get that element of adults buying back their childhood memories to drive up a bidding war.

Looking like a million bucks. Maybe even three.

As for home releases, the most momentous Pac-Man cartridge of all time is primarily known for its novelty... and the really valuable version of that one would be one of the carts that they dug up from that New Mexico landfill. Which is going to be in terrible shape and, we have been told, smells so rancid from sitting for decades in a trash heap under the desert sun that even a sealed container can’t hold in the stench.

This three-million-dollar Mario, on the other hand, sold for an ultra-premium price because it’s in ultra-premium condition. Nothing about it stinks, unless you’re just opposed to the idea of a single game cartridge selling for a price that could fund the production of half a dozen indie games. But at least that money wasn’t wasted on A.I. tokens to create, say, a “photorealistic” remake of Super Mario Bros. Better to throw away a stupid amount of cash in a way that builds awareness of the history of the medium than investing in its erasure, right?