You may balk at having to pay £60 for a game nowadays, or more than £100 for the special edition, but such sums pale in comparison to a single copy of Super Mario Bros which was just auctioned off for thousands of dollars.
The original copy of the NES game, which was released 32 years ago in 1985, started bidding at just at one-cent, but eventually sold on Ebay for the grand total of $30,100.44. That’s around £23,000 in British money.
Including virtual console sales and ports to other consoles, Super Mario Bros has sold in excess of 40 million copies. Nintendo also often bundled it in with the NES console, making the game cartridge itself a relatively common artefact, but this particular copy is special.
Pennsylvania-based professional Ebay seller DKOldies was offering a mint-condition, sealed copy of the game from one of its very first production runs. He estimates that there are only around a dozen of these in the world, making this particular cartridge extremely valuable.
Kotaku spoke directly to the seller, who said that he couldn’t remember exactly how the copy came into his possession, but that it was traded as part of a collection years ago. What a deal that turned out to be.
The games had been sitting in his office for years – and he finally decided to part ways with the lot. Apparently the same buyer of the £23,000 copy of Super Mario Bros also purchased a sealed copy of Kid Icarus for $11,000 (around £8,400).
So there you have it – if you think you may possess old Nintendo games which have miraculously survived in their original sealed form, you may be sat on some serious bucks.