Super Mario Bros. 3 is widely regarded as one of the best platformers of all time, and at least one game collector believes it’s worth more than any other game in history. Heritage Auctions has announced that a sealed, boxed copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES has been sold at auction for $156,000–making it the most expensive single video game purchase ever made.
The previous record was set in July by another Mario game–the original Super Mario Bros. A sealed copy of that game sold for $114,000, but this is a rarer, more special copy. As Heritage Auctions points out, this is a very rare copy where the word “Bros.” is formatted to the left on the box, overlapping with Mario’s glove.
This means that this copy is from the very first production run of Super Mario Bros. 3, making it exceptionally rare. The bidding opened at $62,500, and ended up more than doubling that figure. While bidders are anonymous, it’s noted that 20 people were involved in bidding for the game.
This copy of the game had a Wata 9.2 A+ grade–which means that it’s a pristine copy. The auction, held on November 20, was the first ever video game auction to rack up sales totaling over $1 million, Heritage Auction has reported. It also broke the record for the most expensive Pokemon game, with a pristine copy of Pokemon Red for the Game Boy selling for $84,000.
If you want to play Super Mario Bros. 3 yourself, it’s available through the Nintendo Switch Online service’s NES catalog, which costs $20 a year.
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