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Heritage Auctions sold an unopened copy of the 1996 Nintendo 64 game on Monday Super Mario 64 for $ 1.56 million. According to the auction house, there were 16 auctions and the final price is the highest ever for a single video game. The vintage video game business has been booming for three years, especially during the pandemic, but this selling price has even shocked and scratched seasoned collectors.
“Myself and many others in this space are just blown away by these results,” said Donald Brock Jr., owner of collectibles site Columbia Comics. “If you look at the collectibles market since the pandemic happened, it has exploded. You would think the money would tighten a bit, but it is exactly the opposite. To put the Super Mario 64 prospect sale, Brock notes that the first comic book sold for $ 1 million was Action comics # 1, which featured Superman’s debut, in 2010. It was printed in 1938, so the comic was 72 years old before it hit a million dollar retail price. The first baseball card that sold for over a million dollars was the T206 Honus Wagner in 2000; the card was printed in 1909, so she was 91 at the time of sale. On the other hand, Super Mario 64 is only 25 years old and again broke the million dollar mark at Monday’s auction. “It’s a very short period of time to reach this peak,” said Brock.
Several trends have converged to fuel this rapid increase in vintage video game speculation. A large contingent of comic book collectors, for example, have moved into space in recent years in an attempt to diversify their investments. There also appears to be a tendency among cryptocurrency investors to cash in and collect video games. “You tend to see an increase in game purchases when the cryptocurrency is doing very well, and sometimes it corrects itself a bit as that decreases,” said Josh Hamblin, owner of SideQuest Games store. in Portland, Oregon. His business consisted mostly of people coming in to “buy games to play on the weekends,” but he recently discovered that collectibles had become a big part of the store’s income and was taking him longer. Hamblin also said that collectors are typically people in their 30s or 40s who grew up with these games and “now have the extra money to play with certain collectibles.”
The most expensive titles are typically Nintendo games from the 1980s and 1990s, especially those from the company’s NES console, released in 1983. As is the case with comics, titles that feature early appearances of characters from the well-known franchises like Super Mario, Zelda and Pokémon are the most coveted. But Super Mario 64 features the first 3D render of Mario, the character had played in many console games before that and first appeared in Donkey kong. This, combined with the fact that there are titles rarer than Super Mario 64, has many collectors confused as to why it was the one who broke the $ 1 million cap. “It’s really shocking that this is this game,” Hamblin said. “N64 Mario has a bad reputation with many collectors as not being a good game.” He noted that he would have expected the NES game THE Legend of Zelda, which just sold for $ 870,000 at a Friday auction, to be more valuable than Super Mario 64. Hamblin said, however, that the particular nostalgia for this obviously well-heeled Nintendo 64 collector Mario may have been a factor in the high sale price.
Indeed, given that Super Mario 64 has already sold over a million, and arguably more valuable titles are out there, chances are it won’t be the only seven-figure video game auction. “If this is the real price, there are copies of THE Legend of Zelda it should sell for more than that. There’s a really high quality Mario sticker seal that should cost more than that, ”Brock said. “There are other copies of the game that are earlier copies of these popular franchises which, if this trend continues, are expected to sell for over $ 1.5 million.” One of the main reasons that the price of these vintage video games has gone up so quickly is that there just aren’t many unsealed versions for sale. Unlike collectibles like action figures, there hasn’t always been a culture of keeping video games intact and in their original packaging. Most of the time, people buy a game to open it and play. Thus, there is currently more of an imbalance between supply and demand for unsealed vintage video games.
So what do you do with a video game that is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or more? There is almost no chance that any of these collectors actually play these games; instead, they keep them as trophies in their private collections or wait to resell them at a later date to make a profit. In both cases, the games must be kept in perfect condition. The copies offered for sale are often categorized according to their condition by companies like Wata Games, which assessed the Super Mario 64 cartridge for Monday auction. In order to keep the games in good condition, collectors will often store them in safes in a bank or in plexiglass cases. Games should be protected from UV rays, which may cause discoloration of the packaging design and reduce the value. Dry, temperature-controlled rooms are optimal as oxidation is a nightmare for sensors. For example, Hamblin recalls purchasing a collection of 200 sealed PS1 games in Georgia, but the damp weather caused rust on the staples that held the game manuals, which significantly affected the condition. Turns out, Mario’s most dangerous foe may not be Bowser, but rather the humidity.
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