25-YEAR-OLD SUPER MARIO 64 GAME SELLS FOR RECORD $1.5M

Wed 14 July 2021:

A sealed, mint condition copy of the video game Super Mario 64 has sold at auction for more than $1.5m (£1.1m)

If you bought video games when you were younger you might be sitting on a gold mine, if two recent auctions of mint-condition classic games in the U.S. are any indication.

A 25-year-old Super Mario 64 video game from 1996, still in its sealed cartridge, set a new record after netting $1.56 million at a weekend auction held by Heritage Auctions in Texas, making it the most expensive video game ever sold.

“It seems impossible to overstate the importance of this title, not only to the history of Mario and Nintendo, but to video games as a whole,” said Valarie McLeckie, a video games specialist for Heritage Auctions, which handled the sale.

“The cultural significance of this title and its importance to the history of video games is paramount,” says the company. It was the first 3D adventure the popular character went on, and the condition of the game “is just so breathtaking that we’re really at a loss.”

A few days before the Mario record, an original boxed copy of “The Legend of Zelda” game also fetched $870,000 at auction.

Heritage Auctions called the sealed, early production copy of the game that introduced Link and Zelda to the world as “the apotheosis of rarity, cultural significance, and collection centerpieces.”

In April, Heritage Auctions had achieved a then-record price of $660,000 with a still unopened Super Mario Bros video game from 1985. Last year, comparable games from the Super Mario series were sold at auction for $156,000 and $114,000 each.

The high prices reflect a growing desire by collectors to drop large sums for classic video games, as pointed out by several U.S. media outlets. Guess it’s time to go through your old video game pile.

However some experts have warned that the video game collectibles market is in danger of overheating, with interest in factory-sealed retro games soaring over the past year, generating enormous profits for some collectors.

After the sale, the games writer and broadcaster Pat Contri tweeted: “This ‘pump’ is unnatural and dangerous long-term. 99% of these games are not as rare as these purchase prices justify, the price increases are meteoric, and we do not know how many copies of each title exists.”

———————————————————————————————————————-

FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:

TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent