A Sealed Copy of Super Mario Bros. Becomes the Most Expensive Video Game Ever Sold at Auction

On June 12, 2026, Heritage Auctions sold a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System for a record-breaking $3 million, setting a new all-time record for a video game sold at public auction. The cartridge drew 3,516 bids before reaching that amount, a clear sign of collectors' growing enthusiasm for the rarest pieces of Nintendo history.

This copy was graded 9.6 A++ by experts at certification company PSA, one of the highest scores ever awarded for this variant. It's a "gloss sticker" version, characteristic of the second production wave from early 1986. Only three sealed copies of this exact variant are known to exist today, and this is the highest-graded of the three: it had never before been offered at auction in sealed condition.

A discovery worthy of a movie plot, untouched for nearly 40 years

According to Evan Masingill, an expert at Heritage Auctions, this cartridge was rediscovered only a few months ago, inside a brand new Control Deck console bundle from the Los Angeles test market, one of the very first NES launch regions in the United States between late 1985 and early 1986. The game had therefore never been touched or even unwrapped since it was manufactured nearly forty years ago.

This new record far exceeds the previous one, set in 2021 by another sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. (in hangtab packaging), sold in a private transaction for $2 million. That sale had already marked a turning point as the first video game sale to break six figures, referencing an earlier 2019 transaction. The upward trend of the video game preservation market therefore shows no signs of slowing down.

Source: TechEBlog