A sealed second-production copy of Super Mario Bros What was billed as “the most important video game ever offered at auction” for the NES sold for $3 million on Friday. According to Heritage Auctions, the game has been lying untouched in a box with a launch edition NES Control Deck console for the past 40 years – with the plastic still in the original packaging intact. What makes this particular copy so special is that it has an intact glossy sticker seal, which was offered for a short time in 1986, before Nintendo started shrink-wrapping its games.
According to the auction house, only three second-production copies with the gloss sticker format exist, and this is the best of them, graded PSA 9.6 A++. According to the Heritage Auctions catalogue, “This specific edition has never appeared at a public auction in sealed condition, which underlines how elusive it is.”
Heritage Auction
Since these games were not protected by plastic, it is rare to find an example in such good condition even decades after release. The game and the console it was bundled with date back to the Los Angeles Test Market era, the early days of Nintendo’s expansion into the US. “In many ways,” the auction house wrote, “it represents the closest a collector can come to owning the moment when Super Mario Bros. transformed console video games from a struggling novelty to an enduring part of cultural history.”
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