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The most expensive game sold at the price of two houses in the suburbs
Butcher79
A new record has just been set for the most money spent on a single video game at auction. Last week an appraised copy of Super Mario 64 was sold for an unreal amount of money.
Super Mario 64 was bought for $1,5 million!
This is just a few days after the sealed copy of The Legend of Zelda broke the same record when it was bought at auction for $870. There is no doubt that we will see this record broken again and again in the coming weeks and months.
These sales don't happen in a vacuum. We've seen these nostalgia-driven upsurges a few times over the last year, first with Pokémon cards and then with NFTs. When something thought to be widely available, like a video game or a Pokémon card, suddenly sells for an absurd amount, speculators and short-term investors jump at the chance to make a quick buck. This, in turn, inspires the average gamer who thinks, “Hey, I have old games, maybe they are worth something too.” The bubble is inflated by artificial interest generated by the promise of easy money, until one day it bursts. All "investors" are moving on to the next boom, and gamers are left with a perverted hobby.
There is really nothing new in the collectible game market. Rare games such as the Nintendo World Championship Gold Cartridge, of which only 26 copies were made, are highly sought after collectibles that have sold for up to $100 in the past. The difference here, of course, is that Super Mario 000 is not a rare game. Most of us probably still have a copy of it. You can buy an original cartridge on eBay, just like the one that sold for $64 million for just $1,5. The only difference between the two is the quality of the box it comes in. If you put any cartridge into the N25 they will both play the same game. Today, you can find a dozen more factory sealed and sorted copies of Super Mario 64 on eBay for up to $64.
Like last week's The Legend of Zelda auction, the Pokémon card boom began with a single sale outrageously over market value. Before Logan Paul purchased a $200000 booster set at auction, the previous record for the same product was $2019 in February 78000, a price that has risen steadily over the past 20 years. Since last October, these first edition booster boxes have been selling for $408000 thanks to the extreme inflation caused by influencers and content creators like Paul, who are specifically looking to get the notoriety associated with overpaying for these collectibles.
This sudden price spike sparked a lot of outside interest in the hobby, as both speculators and adults with kids' collections turned to Pokemon as a new get-rich-quick scheme. It didn't take long for speculators around the world to turn reselling Pokemon cards into a full-time job, making the product practically not available at the retail level and skyrocketing the price of packages with every release over the past year. Because of greed and selfishness a whole generation of children had their hobbies taken away, that meant so much to us, but has now become a worthless commodity.
We've seen the same thing happen with all sorts of collectibles and action figures during the pandemic, and now we're seeing it happening with video games. At least with Pokémon cards, it's reasonable to imagine a collector who loves cards all his life but doesn't actually play the game. Do you think there are video game collectors who don't play video games? That's where we'll end up if we keep selling our own childhood like this. Video games are personal experiences between the game and the player. These are not pieces of plastic sealed in cardboard boxes, and it saddens me to think that these recent auctions could have attracted the attention of the same cynical opportunists who are currently defacing Pokemon cards.
A random boxed copy of Super Mario 64 was never supposed to sell for $1,5 million. The effect is hard to predict, but it could inflate the cost of Nintendo cartridges across the board as people start selling all their games for little money. WATA, the game grading company, will almost certainly see much more business in the coming months, as did PSA last year with Pokemon cards. The California company received so many grading cards that it had to stop taking orders for a while because it couldn't train new graders fast enough to keep up with demand.
If you love your video games, don't seal them in plastic and try to sell them to some rich jerk who just wants to brag about how much he's spent. Play your games. Share this experience with the next generation. We don't need to treat game cartridges as a long-term investment. It's disgusting and it only leads to bad things for people who really care about collecting and preserving retro games. If you want to make a quick buck, stick to stocks. Leave video games alone.
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