Last month, someone paid over $1.5 million for a sealed copy of Super Mario 64 at auction, breaking the previous world record for the most expensive game ever sold. Not even a month later, that record has been broken once again.
The New York Times (by way of Nintendo Enthusiast) reports that a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System sold for $2 million. The sale was made on the collectible equity platform "Rally," which lets users pay for portions of "collectible assets" like you would for shares in a company on the stock market.
Rally obtained the sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. last year for the price of $140,000. We don't know how many people bought shares in the game, but whoever did likely made a tidy profit after an anonymous buyer offered $2 million to buy all outstanding shares, effectively purchasing the copy for themselves.
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With more than three-quarters of share-owners voting to approve the sale, the game was sold for $2 million and enters the record books as the highest price ever paid for a video game, ever.
This seal copy of Super Mario Bros. is in "exceptional" condition with a 9.8 WATA rating–the same rating given to the previous record holder, a sealed copy of Super Mario 64 that sold at Heritage Auctions for $1,560,000. Both games are quite likely to be the best-preserved copies remaining in the entire world.
Strangely, someone actually paid $600 for a copy of Skyrim on the Xbox 360 at the same auction that saw Mario 64 go for over $1.5 million. The strange thing here is that Skyrim is so common that it seems unlikely collectors will ever care to pay such a high price for it, but as these auctions prove time and time again, time makes fools of us all.
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