By Dexerto | Created at 2026-06-15 15:26:43 | Updated at 2026-06-16 21:02:29
1 day ago
A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. just sold at Heritage Auctions for $3 million, and the sticker holding it shut is a big part of why.
The copy is from the game’s 1985 second production run, and instead of the shrink-wrap that would become standard, Nintendo sealed it with a glossy sticker that was discontinued almost immediately after.
According to Heritage Auctions, it is the earliest known sealed copy in existence, and Professional Sports Authenticator graded it 9.6 A++. In other words, it is, by any measure, the rarest possible version of the most famous video game ever made.
Super Mario Bros. hits 1-UP on auction record with $3 million sale
The $3 million sale shattered the previous record for the same title, a $2 million sale also through Heritage Auctions in 2021, which itself had arrived hot on the heels of a sealed Super Mario 64 fetching $1.56 million just days earlier.
To put the acceleration in perspective: in July 2020, a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. sold for $114,000 and set the record for the most expensive game ever sold at auction. Six years later, the same game is being sold for more than 26 times that price.
As a footnote to the sale, Heritage threw in a working NES console, on the off chance the buyer decides to do the unthinkable and actually open it.
The market for sealed vintage games has been climbing steeply for years, driven largely by collectors who came of age with NES and N64 hardware and now have the money to chase the artifacts of their childhoods.
Graded copies in particular have exploded in value, with the grade and variant details, rather than the game itself, often determining whether a cartridge is worth hundreds or millions. Heritage Auctions has presided over nearly every record in this space.
For anyone keeping score on how fast this market has moved, we covered the Super Mario 64 sale that briefly held the record at $1.56 million, and the sealed Super Mario Bros. 3 copy that sold for $156,000 back in 2020, which at the time seemed almost incomprehensibly expensive.
