Video games are expensive, that’s nothing new, in fact, the average price of a new game will set you back around £45. So, if I told you that a copy of Super Mario Bros. recently sold for $114,000, making it the most expensive game ever, you’d probably say that was a little on the steep side right? 

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The game broke records

Well, apparently there’s at least one person on the planet, who thought that was a reasonable sum, as they splurged that exact amount on a copy of Super Mario Bros. for the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

Originally released in 1985, the game was sold via auction last week. The winning bid was first spotted by gaming journalist Chris Kohler, but the winning bidder is currently unknown.

At $114,000, this sale of Super Marios Bros. will make it the highest price ever paid for a video game. Geez! I mean, you could buy a house with that!

Why did it sell for so much?

Now before you head out to the garage to dig out your old collection, we should tell you that there’s a reason this particular copy sold for as much as it did.

The $114,000 copy of Super Mario Bros. has never been taken out of its packaging and thus, the cartridge has never been played with. That’s why it was worth so much – because it still looks exactly the same as it did when it was originally purchased back in the 1980s.

Since it hit the shelves, the original Super Mario Bros. has sold more than 40 million copies to date.

As well as it’s near perfect condition, there’s another reason why this particular copy fetched so much at auction – it has a rare feature on its packaging that could really only be appreciated by the most hardcore gamer – cardboard hangtabs.

Isn’t it interesting to understand how the collectors’ market has changed in recent years?  Let’s take another example – Nintendo World Championships. The game made headlines in 2014 after selling for $100,088 on eBay as only 116 copies of the game were ever made.

With all that in mind, we’d like to extend our congratulations to the anonymous person who just spent $114,000 for a rare piece of video game history. We assume that this copy of Super Mario Bros. will be housed in a private collection, but who knows? Maybe its new owner has the cash to burn and just really wants to rip into what’s essentially a $114,000 box in order to play a 35-year-old game that they could otherwise have downloaded online for free.

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