Sealed copy of 'Super Mario Bros. 2' sells for $88,550 in estate sale
By: Mary Sosebee
In our technologically innovated world, many avid gamers keep their focus on what is new. Super Marios Bros have been featured in over 200 different games, consistently giving fans a new take on the original 1985 Super Marios game.
Just as new versions of Super Mario Bros are highly valued by wide-eyed kids around the world, original and unsealed copies of Super Mario Bros from the 1990s do not go unnoticed by enthusiasts.
Discovery
An auction house handling an estate sale for a recently deceased Indiana woman said a sealed copy of 1988 video game Super Mario Bros. 2 sold for a whopping $88,550.
Harritt Group Inc. said workers going through Patricia Martin's Floyd Knobs home to find items to list for the estate sale discovered a box of Nintendo Entertainment System games in the back of a walk-in closet.
"At first glance, it was a comforting wave of classic Nintendo nostalgia. All the classics were there, Super Mario Bros, Duck Hunt, Qix, and even an NES console. So, we did what any children of the 1990s would do: we fired up the console and tested the open games. It was a great day," Harritt Group said in its description of the item.
"At a second glance, it was something else entirely. The seemingly ordinary collection included an extraordinary unopened copy of Super Mario Bros. 2."
The unopened copy of the Super Mario Bros. 2 game was assessed by Wata Games in Denver, which gave it a 9.8 A+ rating -- the second highest score it could receive, the auction house said.
The game ended up selling for $88,550 to a Florida businessman.
Highly Valued
Super Mario Bros. 2 came about after Nintendo of America deemed Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels too difficult for Western audiences, which led Nintendo to redevelop the Family Computer Disk System game Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic into a Super Mario Bros. game for the international release.
In July, a sealed copy of 1996 game Super Mario 64 set a world record in, when it was auctioned for $1.56 million.
An anonymous buyer paid the $1.56 million for a 25-year-old copy of Super Mario 64 in its original packaging, a record price for a video game, according to the auction house that sold it.
Heritage Auctions said that it received 16 bids leading up to and during the live auction on Sunday for the mainly pristine condition 3-D Super Mario game, which sold for about $60 when it was released in 1996 and was the best-selling game for the Nintendo 64 console.
Super Mario 64 is a 1996 platform game for the Nintendo 64 and the first Super Mario game to feature 3D gameplay. It was developed by Nintendo EAD and published by Nintendo. Super Mario 64 features 3-dimensional freedom of movement within a large open world based on 3D polygons.
The top bid was $1.3 million, according to Heritage Auctions, which added a buyer’s premium of 20 percent to the gavel price to bring the total to $1.56 million.
At the time, the price sent shock waves through gaming and collecting circles, even after a recent uptick in five- and six-figure sales of rare video games to investment-minded buyers.
The sale was announced just two days after Heritage Auctions said that an early production copy of The Legend of Zelda from 1987 had sold for $870,000.
The auction came just two days after the previous record was set by a copy of The Legend of Zelda, which fetched $870,000 on July 9, 2021.
Legend of Zelda
The 34-year-old unopened copy of the “Legend of Zelda” was sold via auction, and it fetched $870,000 at Heritage Auctions. The still-sealed rare version of the Nintendo game was not opened since it was purchased in 1987, and it was one of the units that were made on limited production for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
“Legend of Zelda” is a popular game that was first developed and released by Nintendo in 1986. It is a fantasy action-adventure video game franchise that was created by Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto, who are famous Japanese game designers.
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