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Record sales
The Most Expensive Video Games Ever Sold
The market for sealed vintage games ran through a remarkable stretch in 2021, and reporting on it grew tangled almost as fast as the prices climbed. Several figures circulated at once, not all of them describing the same kind of event, and telling a clean auction record apart from a fractional-ownership sale became the difference between an accurate account and a misleading one. This article keeps those apart on purpose.
The clean auction record
The highest verifiable live-auction result for a video game is a sealed copy of Super Mario 64, which sold for 1,560,000 dollars at Heritage Auctions in July 2021. That is the figure to cite when the question is what a game has fetched at a public auction house, because it was a lot in a Heritage sale with a house and a date attached. Heritage announced the result in its own press release, which is as clean a chain of evidence as this field offers.
Three months earlier, in April 2021, a sealed copy of the original Super Mario Bros. sold for 660,000 dollars, also at Heritage. Together those two results establish the live-auction ceiling for the category as it stood, both anchored to the same house and both publicly reported rather than passed along secondhand.
The figures that were not auctions
Higher numbers than the Mario 64 result did circulate in 2021, and this is where care is required. A sealed Super Mario Bros. reported at 2 million dollars in August 2021, and a further figure reported at around 3 million dollars, were both handled through Rally, a fractional-ownership platform, rather than sold as lots at a public auction house. Those are real transactions in their own terms, but a fractional-ownership sale is a different event from an auction, and calling either one an auction record would be simply wrong.
The distinction is not hair-splitting. On a fractional platform, ownership of an object is divided into shares, and a headline valuation can be set by a mechanism quite unlike a room of bidders competing for a single lot. Stating plainly that these were not auction-house sales is the only honest way to place them next to the Heritage results. The National reported on these figures and the confusion around them.
How to read a game price correctly
The practical lesson is to ask, of any headline game price, what kind of sale produced it. If the answer is a named auction house with a date, as with the Heritage results, it is an auction record. If the answer is a fractional-ownership platform, it is a different animal, however large the number. Conflating the two is how a 3 million dollar figure gets loosely reported as the record for a video game when the clean auction record sits at 1,560,000 dollars.
That same discipline runs through every article in this cluster, and our guide to record collectible prices lays out why the kind of sale behind a number matters as much as the number itself.
Common questions
What is the auction record for a video game?
A sealed Super Mario 64 that sold for 1,560,000 dollars at Heritage Auctions in July 2021. It is the highest verifiable public auction-house result for a game, announced by Heritage in its own press release, ahead of a sealed Super Mario Bros. at 660,000 dollars at Heritage in April 2021.
Were the 2 million and 3 million dollar figures auction records?
No. Those higher figures, a sealed Super Mario Bros. reported at 2 million dollars in August 2021 and a further reported figure near 3 million dollars, went through Rally, a fractional-ownership platform, not a public auction house. They are real transactions but a different kind of event, so they are not auction records.
Sources
- Most expensive videogame sold at an online auctionGuinness World Records