Vintage video game copies are selling for ridiculous prices online. Although the ones that do sell for hundreds of thousands if not millions are a rarity, you can still snatch yourself a sizable amount of cash if you’ve got a copy of an older game. After all, you can never underestimate just how much money someone is willing to spend for something that you might see as useless. Case in point, the unopened copy of Super Mario Bros. that just sold for $2 million on Rally.
Copies of vintage Mario games keep on selling big
🏆A NEW WORLD RECORD on Rally🏆 …w/ the $2,000,000 sale of our 1985 Super Mario Bros., marking the HIGHEST PRICE EVER PAID for a video game of any title. Read more in todays New York Times (cc: @nytimes): https://t.co/mJzEcVMXuQ pic.twitter.com/segsfw6Jw9 — Rally (@OnRallyRd) August 6, 2021 Rally, a games collectibles website, just sold a never-opened copy of Super Mario Bros. to an anonymous buyer for $2 million. Surprisingly enough, this isn’t the first time that a Mario game has sold for 7 figures. It’s worth mentioning that the previous record-game was a sealed Super Mario 64 copy. That copy sold for $1.56 million at an auction. Before the previous record-breaking sale happened, a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the most expensive video game ever sold. It fetched around $870,000 at an auction. Now, because of the most recent purchase, two Mario games now hold the top spots as the most expensive video games ever sold. The one thing that stands out the most about this record-breaking sale is that it did not sell at an auction. Before we discuss that, let’s talk about how multiple copies of vintage games have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2020 and 2021. At this point last year, the most expensive game ever sold was a copy of Super Mario Bros. for $114,000. It’s the same game as the aforementioned record-breaking game. The only difference is that this one was in much better condition, as it had never even been opened. Now, for the most interesting part. Most vintage games are sold for high amounts at auctions. This one didn’t. Instead, the $2 million Super Mario Bros. copy was sold by Rally. The video game collectibles website turns video game collectibles into small companies. These companies then have shares that investors can buy. After which, the same investors control and approve the sale of the concerned collectible. Rally reportedly bought the copy of Super Mario Bros. for $140,000 last April. Just a couple of months later, shareholders approved its record-breaking sale of $2 million to an anonymous buyer. This is a nice profit for a game that’s almost as old as the gaming industry itself. Now, only time will tell if this record can hold up for more than a few months.
