A rare, unopened 1985 Super Mario Bros. game cartridge for the Nintendo Entertainment System console fetched $114,000 from an anonymous buyer at auction recently, according to CNN. The winning bid, according to Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, broke the record for the most ever paid for a video game. In February 2019, a mint-condition copy of the same game sold for $100,150.
The game went for so much, the auction house said, mainly because it was “part of one of the short production runs of the game packaged in boxes with a cardboard hangtab underneath the plastic, an indication that it was part of one of the first variants produced after Nintendo started using shrink-wrap to seal the games rather than stickers.”
The video game auction also brought in $84,000 for a prototype of the never-sold Sega Pluto-02 Console; a copy of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! For $50,400; and one of the first sealed copies of Super Mario Bros. 3 – believed to be one of less than 10 copies left in existence – for $38,400.