Super Mario Bros: video game fetches 3 million at auction

On Friday 12 June 2026, someone spent $3 million at auction to take home an unopened, sealed copy of Super Mario Bros, from Heritage Auctions. It is the highest global hammer price ever achieved for a video game to date. Not just any game, but the most significant video game ever to go under the hammer, described by Heritage Auctions as “the holy grail of video game collecting”. The lot in question is, in fact, the first sealed copy from the second print run of Super Mario Bros., as well as the best-preserved of the three from that run. Given that no sealed copies of the game’s first series are currently known to exist, this is the oldest untouched copy on the planet and has, in fact, been awarded an extraordinary PSA 9.6 A++ rating by the certification body PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) Video Games an extraordinary rating of PSA 9.6 A++; the other two sealed copies, on the other hand, have ratings of ‘Wata 9.4 A++’ (the first video game to be sold for six figures in 2019) and ‘VGA 80’. What makes it particularly attractive is also the gloss sticker – the special glossy sticker affixed to the top cover of the box – a design that has been in use since 1986 (previously, for a brief period, it had been matt).

This four-decade-old item, which appeared almost out of nowhere and is in excellent condition, “was discovered just a few months ago inside a bundle with a brand-new NES Control Deck console (which also went to the buyer, ed), meaning it has not been touched for nearly 40 years”, reveals Evan Masingill, Heritage’s video games consignment director, in a statement, who considers the lot’s hammer price “entirely appropriate”. The fact that it has survived in perfect condition until the second quarter of the 21st century is all the more remarkable when one considers that it dates from before Nintendo began sealing its games in heat-shrink wrap.

 
The launch edition of the NES Control Deck, on the other hand, dates back to the Los Angeles test market in October 2025. It was in that year that the Italian-American plumber Super Mario was officially born. He had first appeared in 1981, but under the name ‘Jumpman’; then, in 1983, he was seen in some arcades.

The figure achieved last Friday doubles that paid for a copy of Super Mario 64 in July 2021 – $1.56 million at Heritage Auctions (it was the first video game to break the $1 million barrier). It also surpasses the previous record for a video game, also a Super Mario title, which stood at $2 million (also in 2021, but this time on the Rally split-lot platform). Nintendo of America and its founder and president Minoru Arakawa (1946) named Super Mario in honour of Mario Segale, an Italian-American property developer who, in the 1980s, owned the offices leased by the Japanese company’s fledgling US subsidiary. The symbolic and collectible value of Super Mario Bros, created by Shigeru Miyamoto (1952), lies in the fact that it was the game that revived the North American home console industry, capable of imprinting a mascot so deeply on the collective imagination that it surpassed Mickey Mouse in terms of recognition and popularity.

Super Mario Bros. is, to all intents and purposes, a seminal and iconic artefact of the modern era of entertainment. This sale highlights the robust growth of the collectibles market, a sector in which memorabilia such as this, linked to memories of childhood or youth (throughout the 20th century), are increasingly fetching prices once reserved solely for works of art. In the world of collecting, Super Mario’s significance today is comparable to items such as Action Comics #1 from 1938 for comics (the comic that introduced the character of Superman; $15 million in a private sale in January 2026), the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle rookie card for sport ($12.6 million at Heritage Auctions in August 2022), or the Pikachu Illustrator card for trading cards (16.5 million dollars in February 2026, at Goldin Auctions).