In 2020, a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros., graded 9.4 by Wata, sold for $114,00, a record at that time. Comic books and trading cards have recently had similar booms, and the value of video games has been rapidly increasing over the past year. Though prices are outlandish, they aren’t necessarily anomalies. “This is not some bubble that pops tomorrow.” “These are things that, in the next 10, 20, 30 years are going to go up in value,” Kohler said. Like Pokémon, which is also having a boom in the value of its trading cards, Nintendo games like Super Mario 64 represent a time period for which people have become nostalgic. “Auctions on other speculative items actually went relatively *low* this week, with one matte sticker Mario selling for only $3,600.” “Two genuinely suspect things about this: Despite a lack of population reports, there are many known sealed Super Mario 64 first prints,” Lewin tweeted. Video Game History Foundation co-director and video game retailer Kelsey Lewin expressed a similar opinion. “This is not some bubble that pops tomorrow” “The price jump on this stuff is so sudden, and on such specific items, that I do not believe it happened naturally,” Cifaldi tweeted Sunday. Others, like Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi, expressed initial skepticism based on the sudden value jump. Kohler told Polygon he wouldn’t have guessed that this would be the game to breach $1 million. But this weekend’s price jump to well over $1 million shocked some video game history and preservation experts. Plenty of others, with lower grades from Wata, sold this past year too - ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars on sites like Heritage Auctions and elsewhere. “There’s a bit of a gold rush going on right now, where people are trying to buy up the nicest copies of things that they can, and for whatever reason, money was no object,” Kohler said.Ī copy of Super Mario 64, graded 9.4 A+, sold at Heritage Auctions in January for $38,400. Video game preservationist Chris Kohler told Polygon that finding a copy like this is rare, even for one of the most popular Nintendo 64 games. “Even in these undistributed ‘case-fresh’ copies, most often the results end up with two or fewer 9.8s, and oftentimes none,” Sabga said. Sabga said Wata has received “case-packs” of Nintendo 64 games - straight from the factory and intended for retail - that have never been in circulation or opened. (Sabga declined to say exactly how many.) For a game to get a 10, it has to have been kept in “immaculate” condition but also manufactured perfectly, “making a 9.8A++ the highest reasonably achievable grade for a sealed game,” he said. Video games graded 10 are extremely rare, Wata CEO Ryan Sabga told Polygon - only a “small handful” of games have been given the grade. Wata’s scale goes up to 10, and 9.8 is a very high score. A rating is important for these big-ticket games as a way for buyers to feel confident they’re getting something of value. People submit their video games for review and certification.
Wata is a grading service specializing in retro video games. #HERITAGELIVE #WORLDRECORD!! Super Mario 64 - Wata 9.8 A++ Sealed, N64 Nintendo 1996 USA just sold for $1,560,000 at #HeritageAuctions, smashing previous mark of $870K, set Friday at Heritage for The Legend of Zelda! #SuperMario #Nintendo #N64 #WATA /rHpTuZl95l- Heritage Auctions July 11, 2021 Seller Heritage Auctions called the sealed copy of Super Mario 64 the “highest graded copy” of the game it’s ever sold. Super Mario 64 is not a particularly rare game Nintendo sold millions of copies since it was first released in 1996.īut the majority of those copies of Super Mario 64 don’t have a 9.8 Wata rating - a score from the video game grading company that means the quality is near perfect, in both production and preservation. But video game preservation and history experts were surprised to see Super Mario 64 breach that record, despite the pristine quality of the copy. This moment has been approaching for a while, as video games and other nostalgic media have been increasing in popularity and mainstream appeal (and, importantly, price) over the past couple years. Over the weekend, a sealed copy of Super Mario 64 sold for $1.56 million at Heritage Auctions.
But The Legend of Zelda only held that record for a few days before it was figuratively butt-stomped into second place. Last week, a game cartridge of The Legend of Zelda sold for $870,000, the highest price ever paid for a video game at auction.
0 kommentar(er)
