There’s a Super Mario video game that’s worth a whopping $2 million

This is the first episode of Nintendo’s famous series, released in 1985. There is a Super Mario video game that is worth 2 million dollars.

It’s called “retrogaming” and basically consists in cultivating the cult of video games “of the past”. On Ebay are flourishing ads of old copies for PlayStation or Super Nintendo that come to be worth thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, the video games that have revolutionized the history of the medium can reach even higher prices. Of course, much depends on the state of preservation of the object, much on the circumstances. Both were certainly in favor of Super Mario Bros. released in Japan in 1985 on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Not even Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, creators of the gaming world’s greatest icon, could have imagined how much money would be paid for a perfectly preserved edition of the platform game.

Why Super Mario Bros. is so important for collectors

Maybe not everyone knows, but the first appearance of the Italian plumber is not in the first game ever published in the Mario Bros. saga. It was instead in 1981, in the game Donkey Kong, also developed by the brilliant Nintendo programmer, Shigeru Miyamoto. In Donkey Kong, clearly inspired by the almost homonymous film of 1933, King King, Mario (at the time still called “Jumpman”) had to save a woman from the clutches of an ape, climbing scaffolding and avoiding dangerous rolling barrels.

Another curiosity: we do not know what is the last name of Mario, but if we had to bet this would be “Segale”. Mario Segale is in fact an Italian entrepreneur involved in the real estate development of Seattle and owner of the building that housed the offices of Nintendo.

How much was paid for the rare copy of Super Mario Bros., the most expensive video game ever

The Super Mario Bros. that made headlines is still in its original packaging and has been submitted to the quality assessment of an organization specialized in evaluating rare copies of video games. The organization is called WataGaming and has a well-established grading system, universally accepted by collectors, that affects the price of the game. In the case of Super Mario Bros. the rating was 9.8 A+ out of 10. That’s a near-perfect score.

Another interesting part of this story involves who sold the copy: it’s Rally, which allows investors to buy stock in expensive collectibles and make money the moment the latter are sold. Super Mario Bros. investors got a 900% return.

The final price? As much as $2 million. An absolute record, higher than the $1.5 million copy of Super Mario 64 sold in July and the 870,000 sold for The Legend of Zelda. A Super Mario Bros. cartridge, evidently with different features, had been sold for a significant amount but nowhere near 2 million.

Ah, did you notice? They are all Nintendo games.

Giuseppe Giordano