A rare, sealed copy of a 1985 Super Mario Bros. game sold for $30,100.44 by DKOldies on eBay on Wednesday. The game was supposedly in mint-condition and although the man who bought it is anonymous, it is the most anyone has ever paid for a game in the history of the DKOldies store.
How could a game from over 30 years ago sell for so much money? Is it even worth that much?
“The reason that game went for so much was because Mario was always sold in the system," Drew Steimel, CEO of DKOldies, told Mashable. "You bought it with the system, it came in the box. This particular copy was from before that happened, before Nintendo decided to bundle them. They only did it for a short time."
This rare edition of the game can be identified by a hashtag on the back of the box, which indicates it would have been sold in a store. According to Steimel, more common copies of the game usually go for $10 to $15.
And just to add the icing on the cake, whoever bought it didn’t stop at Super Mario - he bought other games, including a sealed copy of Kid Icarus for $11,000.
Although $30,000 is an insane amount of money for a video game, Nintendo has always known how to make games and consoles that will lead people to eventually spend that much cash. Take, for example, the NES Classic, which was released at the end of 2016 to a great amount of hype. The demand was intense, and although a large reason not everyone was able to buy one was because Nintendo sucks at releases, the console’s relatively short shelf-life—from November to April—automatically certifies this as a rare device people will be shelling out the cash for in 30 years (if we as a planet last that long. #dark).
In addition, Super Mario Odyssey, a new 3D Mario game, will also be released in October for Nintendo Switch, creating yet another possible game that will be sold for tens of thousands of dollars in a few decades. With new console and game releases, Nintendo is keeping itself relevant not just now, but for years to come.
