Five Million in a Room, a New Record for the Collectible Video Game Market

Auctions of sealed video games are almost always told with a single figure, the biggest one, and Heritage Auctions’ Signature 7453 session offers one that is hard to ignore: three million dollars for a single copy of Super Mario Bros. still sealed in its cellophane. It is the second-highest sale ever for a video game, and by itself it would be enough to make news. But reducing June 13 to that number means missing the real story, which is twofold.

On one hand there is the top end, where very few lots absorb almost all the money: the first three lots, all for NES, alone account for 78.3% of the total proceeds. On the other hand there is a deep and surprisingly accessible body, made up of 93 lots sold for under five thousand dollars, with a median holding steady at $4,000. The same auction that makes headlines for the million is also the one in which a game enters a collection, graded and guaranteed, at the price of a smartphone.

It is this tension, between the unique trophy and the everyday market, that is the key to reading the numbers that follow. We reconstructed them lot by lot and gathered them in the tables and charts of this article, as well as in the attached spreadsheet with title, lot number, and sale price for all 157 pieces.

One single lot is worth more than all the other one hundred and fifty-six put together. It is a snapshot of a very narrow pyramid-shaped market, where the price of unique pieces rises much faster than that of the rest of the list.

The point. The top lot accounts for 59.4% of the auction, the first three lots 78.3%, the first ten 84.4%. Those who buy at the top are not buying a market, they are buying an object. For everything else, the normal rules of demand apply.

Three lots weigh 78%. The other 154 divide up the rest.

Below the summit, however, the market is alive and liquid. The distribution of the 157 lots by price range shows a very dense central body: 50 lots are placed between one thousand and three thousand dollars, another 34 lots between five and ten thousand, and in all, as many as 93 pieces out of 157 remain below the five-thousand threshold. Only 30 lots exceed ten thousand dollars, and just five go beyond fifty thousand. In short, the curve is very steep.

This figure explains why the two averages tell two different auction stories. The arithmetic mean, $32.151, is inflated by the three million from the top lot and describes an auction that in reality no one experienced. The median, $4.000, is much more honest and tells the truth about certified video game collecting today: a serious, documented hobby, but still within reach of an enthusiast. Holding together the two readings, the trophy and the price list, is the only honesty possible in the face of numbers so far apart.

But how much is the standard lot really worth? The question becomes more precise by looking at the median console by console, that is, how much the average piece of each platform costs, far from the records.

The most surprising fact is that the NES, the record-breaking console, has a median of just $4,750: the millions live in three pieces, not on the price list. Leading the typical price, instead, is the Game Boy Color, driven by sealed Pokémon editions, while PC and Nintendo 64 remain the cheapest entry points, with the median lot below three thousand dollars. In short, the most legendary console is not necessarily the one with the highest entry ticket.

All three pieces on the podium are sealed NES games, all three certified by PSA. It is the clearest confirmation of the session: at the top of the market, the origin of the console that rebuilt the industry continues to matter more than anything else. And not for nostalgia, but for scarcity: of those games, in the oldest packaging and with the highest grades, only a handful of known examples survive.

$3.000.000  Absolute record · Lot #28025

Super Mario Bros., PSA 9.6 A++ Sealed, Gloss Sticker, Second Production, with Control Deck. NES, 1985.

$575.000  Second · Lot #28026

Super Mario Bros., PSA 9.8 A+ Sealed, Hangtab, 1 Code, Mid-Production. NES, 1985.

$375.000  Third · Lot #28017

The Legend of Zelda, PSA 9.6 A+ Sealed, NES TM, No Rev-A, First Production. NES, 1987.

The scale jump is clear: from the top lot at three million, it drops to $575,000 and $375,000, and by fourth place the order of magnitude has already changed. But it is precisely in the chasing tier that the most interesting signals can be read for collectors.

The hidden record. Slalom, a NES title far from famous, sealed PSA 9.8, was sold for $75,000. It is proof that, at the very top end, they are not buying the game: they are buying the intact seal, the early production signature, and the very high grade. The rarity of the condition matters more than the title’s fame.  

The same goes for the patrol of 1985 and 1986 titles that crowd the top of the ranking: Excitebike at $35,000, Donkey Kong Jr. at $32,500, Wrecking Crew at $23,750, Clu Clu Land and Gumshoe both at $21,250. These are the games from the very first NES release, the ones with the plain cardboard box and the sticker sealing it, now extremely rare to find still unopened. None of these is a celebrated masterpiece: their price is almost entirely packaging rarity.

Outside the Nintendo world, the most expensive piece is a surprise: World of Warcraft, sealed and VGA 90-graded collector's edition for PC, stopped at $35,000, on par with Excitebike. On the modern front, a sealed copy of Zelda Breath of the Wild in PSA 10 condition reached $20,000, a sign that grading for recent video games now has a real market of its own.

Looking at franchises rather than individual lots, the picture becomes simpler: a few major intellectual properties account for almost all the money. Super Mario dominates clearly, ahead of The Legend of Zelda and Pokémon, the three pillars on which the value of Nintendo collecting rests. Pokémon in particular, while without a single million-euro lot, lines up 18 lots spread across Game Boy, Game Boy Color, GBA and Nintendo DS: it is the most cross-platform brand in the auction, a volume engine more than a record-setter.

In the auction ranking, the first game appears six times with the same name, Super Mario Bros., and with six prices ranging from three million to just over three thousand dollars. It is not a cataloging error: these are six different objects that share only the title. Understanding what sets them apart is the best way to understand how the value of a collectible video game is formed.

Super Mario Bros. was released in 1985 and has been sold for years, in millions of copies and in many slightly different packages. Grading reads those differences and puts them in order. Three things matter most.

1. Sealed or open. A copy still sealed in the original cellophane (Sealed) is worth a multiple of a complete but open one (CIB, Complete In Box). The intact seal certifies that no one has ever handled it: it is the difference between an artifact and a used object. This is most evident when comparing copies of the same title: in the table below, sealed copies of Super Mario Bros. clearly outperform complete but open ones, for the same game.  

2. Condition, that is, the grade. On sealed copies, the price rises exponentially with the grade. The gap between an 8.0 and a 9.6 is not one and a half points: it is orders of magnitude, because the surviving nearly perfect copies are very few.  

3. The production signature. Minimal packaging details indicate how early the print run is. The first 1985 distribution used a sticker that sealed the box (sticker sealed, first matte and then glossy); only later came the hangtab to hang the game on store displays (hangtab, with variants with 1, 2 or 3 codes) and, later still, the oval seal. The older and rarer the variant, the higher the value.  

On this scale, the paradox of the podium is measured. The three-million lot is a 9.6, half a point below the 9.8 sold for $575,000: yet it is worth more than five times as much. The reason is that the grade is not everything. That copy combines one of the most desirable seal variants and, above all, it was sold together with the console (with Control Deck): a very rare original configuration, almost a one-of-a-kind piece. A half-point difference in grade does not beat uniqueness.

The central part of the catalog is where an auction shows its depth. Beneath the big names, session 7453 is full of categories that have their own market, made up of connoisseurs who know exactly what they are looking for. These are also the niches in which a prepared collector can still build value.

The games that never came out

Five lots in the auction are certified prototypes, game cartridges that never made it to market. Two canceled NES titles, AD&D: Dragons of Flame and Mike Ditka's Big Play Football, both stop at $4,000; the Contra prototype for Famicom, with its original box, at $2,750. They are archive pieces, physical testimonies of a software history that would otherwise not exist. Overall, the 5 prototypes in the auction show that, for some collectors, what a game represents matters more than what a game is.

The mistakes that matter

Collectors love mistakes, if they are rare. The session offers two schools of thought. Final Fantasy VII for PS1, with the word Masterpiece printed by mistake, soars to $5,625 in PSA 9.8 grade. And the Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen editions with the Adapater typo on the packaging, certified by CGC, fetch $4,000 and $3,250 respectively. The printing error turns a common game into an identifiable variant, and therefore a collectible one.

Pieces that are not even toys

Among the most curious lots is Red Sea Crossing, a obscure religious game for the Atari 2600 from 1983, complete with its audiocassette, sold for $6,562: one of the rarest cartridges from the entire Atari era. And then there is an item that is not a game: the original Neal Adams illustration with Mario’s face, created for the 1990 Nintendo World Championships, sold for $9,687. When collecting matures, it starts buying the things around the game too: the art, the promotional materials, the history.

The renaissance of the Sega Saturn

The category surprise is the Sega Saturn, a commercially unlucky console and for that very reason valuable for collectors: few copies printed, tiny print runs from publishers like Working Designs. In this session the 11 Saturn lots moved $52.438, with Dragon Force at $8.125 and Tomb Raider at $9.375, both sealed and in very high grade. It is the kind of niche that rewards those who know the catalog better than the market.

Hardware and modern, new frontiers

Finally, two signals about the future of collecting. Sealed consoles now have their own market: a brand-new Super Nintendo in box with Super Mario World, launch edition, sells for $5,750. And recent video games are firmly entering the display case: alongside the Zelda Breath of the Wild PSA 10 at $20,000, sealed Switch, Wii, and Nintendo DS units are appearing. Grading is no longer focused only on the 1980s: it is already certifying the present, and with it broadening the base of people who can collect.

Without a credible, encapsulated, and verifiable grade, none of these numbers would exist. Every major lot in the session is sealed and certified by one of the four major international grading companies. But their weight, in value, is anything but uniform.

PSA dominates the takings with 89.5% of the value, but above all because it certified the most expensive items. In terms of number of lots, the field is much more balanced: VGA is present on 51 lots, Wata on 29, CGC on 10. It is a snapshot of the sector’s historical moment: VGA and Wata, the pioneers of video game grading, preside over the volumes and the market’s memory; PSA, which arrived later from the world of cards and stickers, has taken the high end with impressive speed. The acronym on the label occupies different niches, but does not create value on its own.

Reading for TGM. The value does not lie in the acronym, but in the quality and rarity of the item that acronym describes. It is exactly the principle on which TGMGrading builds its method: a documented and repeatable judgment, not a stamp.  

The NES’s dominance, in terms of value, is overwhelming, but it’s an effect that needs to be understood clearly: the NES is worth so much not because each of its cartridges is worth a lot, but because the medium’s very few absolute trophies were born there. Set aside the NES, which is off the charts, and the rest of the price list tells the story of a much broader and more varied market.

Below the surface, platforms like SNES, Game Boy, and Nintendo 64 move solid, widespread volumes, the true bread and butter of collecting: together they are worth more than two hundred thousand dollars, spread across dozens of affordable lots. It is here, and not on the million-dollar podium, that the real health of the market is measured, because this is where trading happens every day.

A geography still American

The provenance of the edition tells the other side of rarity: this is, once again, a deeply American market. U.S. edition copies dominate both in number and, above all, in value, while Japanese editions hold a valuable niche and European editions remain almost entirely an exception.

The American editions account for 97.7% of the value across 139 lots, driven by the three giants on the podium. Japan contributes 16 lots, mainly original Famicom and Pocket Monsters versions, a niche that is as small as it is sought after. Europe appears with just one item. For European collecting, this is a clear sign, almost a gap to be filled: the space to build a local market, with nearby items and certifications, is still largely unwritten. And that is exactly the position The Games Market wants to occupy.

Beyond the three-million headline figure, session 7453 leaves three concrete takeaways for those who collect, sell, or value sealed video games.

1. The high end is a market of uniqueness. Sealed NES trophies do not follow a curve; they make their own history. For these pieces, the price is an event, not a quotation, and depends on an unrepeatable combination of title, seal, grade, and provenance.  

2. The body of the market is accessible. With a median of $4,000 and 93 lots under five thousand dollars, certified collecting is not a club for millionaires only. It is here, in the niches and in the mid-market, that the sector’s growth is being decided.  

3. Certification is the common currency. 100% of important lots are sealed and graded. Grading does not describe value: it makes it possible, because it transforms a subjective judgment into data on which two strangers can exchange millions.  

Stacked in a row, these numbers say one thing only. An auction that bids just one game at three million dollars and at the same time places ninety-three under five thousand, that rewards prototypes as much as printing errors, that ranges from the Sega Saturn to sealed modern titles, is not a speculative flash in the pan: it is a market that has learned to distinguish, document, and assign a price to every level of rarity. The event shows that video game collecting is not only mature, with rules, reference points, and a value scale recognized by everyone: it is also growing, broadening the base of buyers and the depth of what is traded. The record makes the headline, but it is the solidity of everything else that tells the story of where this market is going. And in that direction TGM wants to be the European home: one place, and no doubt about it.

Methodological note. Sale data taken from the Heritage Signature 7453 session (13 June 2026); values in US dollars including the buyer’s premium. Classifications by platform, grader, provenance, saga and condition prepared by The Games Market based on the official lot descriptions. Past sales do not constitute a guarantee or a forecast of future value. Editorial document for informational purposes only, not investment advice.

The Games Market. Timeless gaming.