> the iconic game whose popularity established Nintendo’s dominance in home console gaming in the 1980s, sold for $3 million on Friday afternoon in the first session of Heritage Auctions’ June 12–13 Video Games Signature® Auction, hammering the previous $2 million record set in a 2021 private sale.
I wouldn’t trust any auction run by Heritage. They’re reasonably known for turning video games into speculative assets rather than collectibles, and they’ve helped drive up prices for actual fans who just love the games.
Further they’ve been embroiled in scandals alongside Wata Games, with allegations of price manipulation.
Investing has ruined basically every collectible hobby at this point, to the point wizards themselves thought it was acceptable to try to sell 1000$ packs of cardboard cards. Noone cares about the people who just want game peices to play a game
The rarity is that very few copies ever existed of a standalone boxed SMB.
Not every console came with SMB. One very early package didn't have it, and one later package included SMB3 instead. So SMB was sold as a standalone for these cases, but very few units were needed or extant.
Of the cartridge, yes. As do about 58 million other people.
Not sealed in box, no. But usually a product going for a price like this is predicated on rarity, not just historical value. That's why Detective Comics #27, Action Comics #1, Amazing Fantasy #15, etc. command a pretty penny. Those comics didn't have circulation in the millions back in the day...
In the coin collecting universe, which has had a world of third party grading for close to 50 years now, there's a saying "buy the coin, not the holder". But at the same time, there's also a sub-market of people explicitly buying the holder. People will pay a comical premium to hold the "finest ever graded" (or conversely, the "lowest ever graded") example of the same basic date-and-variety.
The difference is that the coin market evolved this ecosystem somewhat organically. The services originally started more towards "proving a rare date prone to counterfeiting is authentic" and "providing a neutral third-party since grading can be imprecise and subjective". People didn't start considering the holder for quite a while.
I think part of the ickniness is that this smells like it was designed to puff up the legitimacy of the grading service as much as anything. It's not like taking something that's understood as broadly rare-- some one-off prototype or widely known scarce item (like the World Championship cartridges). Instead, they're taking something very common and trying to focus on "peripheral" rarity factors-- a sub-variety (some particular early packaging) and a condition rarity (most units are no longer untouched and sealed). This has a smell of "you too could turn a fairly typical item into something life-changing by sending it in for professional certification!"
We get that stuff in the coin collecting world, but it usually doesn't make as much hay as you'd expect. People still get way more excited about the simple "1804 dollar" than the probably rarer "1817/4 half dollar, Overton 102 variety, top grade"
From the article:
> the iconic game whose popularity established Nintendo’s dominance in home console gaming in the 1980s, sold for $3 million on Friday afternoon in the first session of Heritage Auctions’ June 12–13 Video Games Signature® Auction, hammering the previous $2 million record set in a 2021 private sale.
I wouldn’t trust any auction run by Heritage. They’re reasonably known for turning video games into speculative assets rather than collectibles, and they’ve helped drive up prices for actual fans who just love the games.
Further they’ve been embroiled in scandals alongside Wata Games, with allegations of price manipulation.
Good article about this:
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/report-alleges-auct...
Investing has ruined basically every collectible hobby at this point, to the point wizards themselves thought it was acceptable to try to sell 1000$ packs of cardboard cards. Noone cares about the people who just want game peices to play a game
If I discover time travel I wouldn't tell anyone, but there would be signs.
Considering that Super Mario Bros came with the console, this feels like nothing more than a flex. Or money laundering.
The rarity is that very few copies ever existed of a standalone boxed SMB.
Not every console came with SMB. One very early package didn't have it, and one later package included SMB3 instead. So SMB was sold as a standalone for these cases, but very few units were needed or extant.
Do you have a copy?
Of the cartridge, yes. As do about 58 million other people.
Not sealed in box, no. But usually a product going for a price like this is predicated on rarity, not just historical value. That's why Detective Comics #27, Action Comics #1, Amazing Fantasy #15, etc. command a pretty penny. Those comics didn't have circulation in the millions back in the day...
In the coin collecting universe, which has had a world of third party grading for close to 50 years now, there's a saying "buy the coin, not the holder". But at the same time, there's also a sub-market of people explicitly buying the holder. People will pay a comical premium to hold the "finest ever graded" (or conversely, the "lowest ever graded") example of the same basic date-and-variety.
The difference is that the coin market evolved this ecosystem somewhat organically. The services originally started more towards "proving a rare date prone to counterfeiting is authentic" and "providing a neutral third-party since grading can be imprecise and subjective". People didn't start considering the holder for quite a while.
I think part of the ickniness is that this smells like it was designed to puff up the legitimacy of the grading service as much as anything. It's not like taking something that's understood as broadly rare-- some one-off prototype or widely known scarce item (like the World Championship cartridges). Instead, they're taking something very common and trying to focus on "peripheral" rarity factors-- a sub-variety (some particular early packaging) and a condition rarity (most units are no longer untouched and sealed). This has a smell of "you too could turn a fairly typical item into something life-changing by sending it in for professional certification!"
We get that stuff in the coin collecting world, but it usually doesn't make as much hay as you'd expect. People still get way more excited about the simple "1804 dollar" than the probably rarer "1817/4 half dollar, Overton 102 variety, top grade"