A factory-sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. sold for $3 million at Heritage Auctions’ June 12–13 Video Games Signature Auction, according to Heritage Auctions’ own results announcement. The price shatters the previous $2 million benchmark set by a 2021 private sale, making this the most expensive video game ever sold at public auction.

Key Points

• The cartridge graded PSA 9.6 A++, the highest mark ever assigned to this specific Super Mario Bros. packaging variant, per Heritage’s official lot listing.
• It’s a second-production-run copy from 1985 carrying Nintendo’s short-lived glossy foil sticker seal, used only briefly before the company switched to shrink-wrap.
• Only three sealed copies of this gloss-sticker variant are known to exist worldwide, and this was the first to ever surface at public auction.
• The cartridge turned up months before the sale, sealed inside an unopened, complete launch-edition NES Control Deck console bundle, where it sat untouched for roughly 40 years, according to Yahoo Finance’s coverage of the sale.
• The $3 million result more than doubled the prior world record, and no consignor or buyer was publicly identified.

Evan Masingill, Heritage’s Consignment Director for Video Games, called the sale fitting given the game’s legacy: “It is only appropriate that the most significant video game in the world should bring the most impressive result in the history of the hobby,” he said in Heritage’s own announcement.

The record didn’t happen overnight. Heritage has been chronicling this same title’s rising price for over a decade: a different sealed copy hit $114,000 in an earlier Signature Auction, then $660,000 a few years later, before a 2021 private transaction pushed the ceiling to $2 million. This copy leapfrogged all of them by a full million dollars in a single sale.

Reporting independently on the auction, Kotaku pointed out that the cartridge’s rarity comes down to timing: Nintendo used the glossy sticker seal on only a narrow early batch before switching to shrink-wrap, meaning almost none survived the way this one did.

Super Mario Bros. launched with the NES in test markets in October 1985 before going nationwide, and it’s widely credited with helping revive the U.S. home console industry after the 1983 crash. Heritage has compared the cartridge’s collectible standing to Action Comics #1 in the comic-book world — a single piece of plastic and cardboard now treated less like a toy and more like a museum object, one that happened to spend four decades sealed inside somebody’s unopened Christmas present.

For a hobby that started with kids trading cartridges at recess, the jump to seven figures says less about Mario himself and more about how thoroughly retro gaming has folded into the same collectibles economy as vintage comics, trading cards, and sneakers. Grading services, provenance research, and now record-setting hammer prices have turned childhood clutter into an asset class, and this cartridge just became its most expensive example yet.