Sealed Super Mario Bros. copy sells for record $3 million at Heritage Auctions

A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for NES sold at Heritage Auctions on June 13 for $3 million, setting a new all-time record for the most expensive video game ever sold at public auction. The buyer also walked away with the unopened NES Control Deck console the cartridge was bundled with — a nice bonus, even if the hardware isn't exactly pulling its weight on the price tag.

What makes this copy worth eight figures is a combination of condition, provenance, and extreme scarcity. PSA graded it 9.6 A++, making it the highest-rated of only three known sealed copies from Super Mario Bros.'s second production run — the others hold a VGA 80 and a Wata 9.4 A++. That second-production run is identified by a specific gloss sticker seal on the box, which was replaced by standard shrink wrap shortly after. Heritage consignment director Evan Masingill noted the copy was discovered just months ago inside a brand-new, never-opened Control Deck NES bundle, meaning it had gone untouched for roughly 40 years. It's also the first sealed second-production copy to appear at public auction. Heritage called it "the holy grail of video game collecting."

The $3 million figure more than doubles the previous record — a sealed Super Mario Bros. copy that sold for $2 million in 2021, itself nearly double what a sealed copy fetched in 2022 for $660,000. The escalation goes back further: a Wata 9.4-graded sealed copy sold for $114,000 in 2020, which was already a record at the time. This latest sale was graded by PSA, which took over video game ratings from subsidiary Wata last year. That's worth noting given the history: Wata and Heritage Auctions have long had intertwined business relationships, and a class action lawsuit filed after the 2021 Super Mario 64 sale accused Wata of inflating grades to boost its own reputation. That suit is still moving through the courts.

Skeptics in the collecting community have consistently argued that big-name titles like Super Mario Bros. command inflated prices because of brand recognition rather than genuine rarity — pointing out that obscure titles like Blockbuster-exclusive ClayFighters or certain Flintstones cartridges are far rarer but fetch a fraction of the price. Whether this $3 million sale reflects true market value or speculative maneuvering, it's now the benchmark every future retro game auction will be measured against.