Super Mario 64 sold for $ 1.5 million at auction

Last week, a game cartridge of THE Legend of Zelda sold for $ 870,000, the highest price ever paid for a video game at auction. But THE Legend of Zelda only held that record a few days before it was figuratively crushed in second place. Over the weekend, a sealed copy of Super Mario 64 sold for $ 1.56 million at Heritage Auctions.

That moment has been approaching for some time, as video games and other nostalgic media have grown in popularity and mainstream appeal (and, most importantly, in price) over the past couple of years. But experts in video game preservation and history were surprised to see Super Mario 64 break this record, despite the impeccable quality of the copy. Great Mario 64 is not a particularly rare game; Nintendo has sold millions of copies since its first release in 1996.

But the majority of these copies of Super Mario 64 don’t have a 9.8 Wata rating – a rating from the video game review company which means the quality is near perfect, both in production and curation. Heritage Auctions seller called the sealed copy of Super Mario 64 the “highest rated copy” of the game he’s ever sold.

Wata is a rating service specializing in retro video games. People submit their video games for review and certification. A rating is important for these big priced games as it is a way for buyers to be sure that they are getting something of value.

The Wata scale goes up to 10, and 9.8 is a very high score. Video games ranked 10 are extremely rare, Wata CEO Ryan Sabga told ServerPlay – only a “small handful” of games received the rating. (Sabga declined to say exactly how much.) In order for a game to score a 10, it must have been kept in “pristine” condition but also perfectly crafted, “making a 9.8A ++ the reasonably highest rating. achievable for a sealed game, ”he said.

Sabga said Wata received “cardboard boxes” of Nintendo 64 games – direct from the factory and destined for retail sale – that have never been in circulation or opened. “Even in those ‘new’, undistributed copies, more often than not the results end with two or less of 9.8s, and often none,” Sabga said.

Video game curator Chris Kohler told Gameserver that finding a copy like this is rare, even for one of the more popular Nintendo 64 games. “There’s a gold rush right now, where people are trying to buy the finest copies of things they can, and for some reason money wasn’t a problem,” he said. Kohler said.

A copy of Super Mario 64, rated 9.4 A +, sold at Heritage auction in January for $ 38,400. Many more, with lower qualities of Wata, were also sold in the past year, ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars on sites like Heritage Auctions and elsewhere. But this weekend’s price hike to over $ 1 million has shocked some experts in video game history and preservation. Kohler told ServerPlay that he wouldn’t have guessed this would be the game to cross the million dollars. Others, like the founder of the Video Game History Foundation, Frank Cifaldi, expressed their initial skepticism based on the sudden jump in value.

“The price increase on this product is so sudden and on items so specific that I don’t think it happened naturally” Cifaldi tweeted on Sunday. “Everything looks really suspicious imo.”

Video Game History Foundation co-director and video game retailer Kelsey Lewin expressed a similar opinion. “Two really suspicious things about this: despite a lack of population reports, there are many known seals Super Mario 64 first impressions ”, Lewin tweeted. “Bids on other speculative items have actually been relatively * low * this week, with a matte Mario sticker selling for just $ 3,600.”

Like Pokémon, which is also experiencing a boom in the value of its collectible cards, Nintendo games like Super Mario 64 represent a period of time for which people have become nostalgic.

“These are things that in the next 10, 20, 30 years are going to go up in value,” Kohler said. “It’s not a bubble bursting tomorrow.”

Although the prices are far-fetched, they are not necessarily anomalies. Comics and trading cards have seen similar booms recently, and the value of video games has grown rapidly over the past year.

In 2020, a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros., rated 9.4 by Wata, sold for $ 114.00, a record at the time. A year later, a rare copy of super mario bros., rated 9.6 by Wata, sold for $ 660.00 – more than five times the 2020 price.

“We have been seeing a steady increase in the prices of the games we authenticate and review for some time,” Sabga said. “It’s not new or sudden for us.”

Value is, of course, directly related to the price someone will pay for something – and, clearly, someone really wanted this near-blank copy of Super Mario 64. Several bidders took part in the auction to drive the price up to an astronomical level.

That kind of rapid increase isn’t necessarily good or bad for video game curators, Kohler said. Super Mario 64 has been preserved; there are many copies of it, and on top of that, someone leaked the source code.

“I don’t think this sale for what it was sold for will have such a big impact on actual preservation,” Kohler said. It would be a problem to see that kind of price for unreleased games and prototypes – stuff trapped on a single ROM cartridge, he said.

Cifaldi added in a tweet on Monday, in response to concerns that high prices for retro games could impact their preservation, that the Video Game History Foundation focuses primarily on “information and context”, placing little emphasis on “archiving a blank copy of a popular game ”. He noted that Wata, for his part, has also benefited the preservationist scene: Cifaldi said that the Video Game History Foundation has contracted with Wata to archive prototype game data transmitted through the rating system. He said “every prototype” submitted to Wata since September has been archived by the foundation.