Four records instead of one

The Heritage Auctions Signature 7454 session, closed on August 29, is the third video game auction of 2026 and the first without a clear star lot. A bit of context: Heritage is the major Texas auction house and this is an American auction, designed for the American market, with prices in dollars, lots almost all in US editions, and buyers largely from the United States. We are looking at it from Europe for precisely this reason: the United States remains the global benchmark market for video game collecting, and these sessions are its barometer. In March, the Texas house had moved nearly two million dollars spread across 317 lots; in June it rose to five million, but with a single Super Mario Bros. at three million covering more than half of the total. This time the script changes: 134 lots, a total take of 3.19 million dollars, and a top lot, the sealed 1986 NES Mario Bros., which stops at 450,000 dollars, just 14.1% of the auction.

The title, however, belongs to another figure: the median. The middle lot in this session is worth 9,688 dollars, more than double June’s 4,000. Heritage brought fewer pieces to the room, chosen more carefully, and the market responded across the full depth of the list, not just at the top end. As always, we have reconstructed the auction lot by lot.

In sealed video game auctions, value almost always concentrates at the top. That happened again this time, but in much healthier proportions: the top lot accounts for 14.1% of the proceeds, the first three lots for 27.4%, and the first ten lots for 49.2%. In June, those same three shares were 59.4%, 78.3%, and 84.4%. In other words: half of the money in this session is outside the first ten lots, and it’s the first time in 2026.

Half of the money from this session is outside the top ten lots.

The point. When the top lot falls flat and the total holds up, it means the body of the catalog is supporting the market. The 124 lots outside the top ten are worth a combined $1.62 million, more than half of the auction.

The distribution by price range confirms the leap in quality. No lot stopped below one thousand dollars, whereas in June there were six. The leading range is the one between ten and fifty thousand dollars: 55 lots out of 134, for a value of 1.21 million, 38% of the entire auction. In total, 67 pieces out of 134 reached or exceeded ten thousand dollars: in June, just one lot in five had managed to do so.

Even the two averages, for once, tell almost the same story. The arithmetic mean, $23,835, is not inflated by a single monster; the median, $9,688, is only 2.5 times lower, compared with 8 times in June. It is the statistical sign of a consistent price list, without chasms between one tier and the next.

How much does the typical lot cost, platform by platform? Game Boy leads with a median of $24,375, driven by sealed Japanese Pocket Monsters and a Super Mario Land at $200,000. The NES, with 48 lots, holds a solid median of $13,750. At the bottom of the scale, Super Nintendo remains the gateway to certified collecting: 25 lots with a median of $4,000.

Mario Bros. at 450,000 dollars, Super Mario 64 at 225,000, Super Mario Land at 200,000, Mario Kart 64 at 187,500: the first four lots of the session all belong to the same family. This had never happened before, not even in record-breaking auctions. And the fifth Mario, a Super Mario World SNES at 61,250 dollars, is ninth. In total, the series places 13 lots for 1.35 million dollars: 42.2% of the entire auction is a plumber.

$450.000  Absolute record · Lot #28024. Mario Bros., PSA 9.2 A++ Sealed, Gloss Sticker, First Production. NES, 1986. The home version of the coin-op that in 1983 first put Mario and Luigi on the same screen: in first production, sealed, it is a census item, rarer than the Super Mario Bros. that make the headlines.

$225.000  Secondo · Lotto #28077. Super Mario 64, PSA 9.8 A++ Sealed. Nintendo 64, 1996. The game that taught platformers the third dimension, in the highest grade seen circulating in the market.

$200.000  Third · Lot #28062. Super Mario Land, PSA 9.8 A+ Sealed, Green Screenshots, First Production. Game Boy, 1989. The Mario from the Game Boy launch, with the green screenshots from the very first print run.

The collection within the collection. Inside the top ten there is a compact group: four sealed Nintendo 64 games graded PSA 9.8 A++, Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye 007 and Ocarina of Time, which together are worth $618,750. With Pokémon Stadium 2, the fifth in the series at $32,500, the total reaches $651,250. Five lots with the same certification and the same grade, four of them inside the top ten: the market rewarded them as a group. The Nintendo 64, with 15 lots for $721,875, is the auction’s second platform behind the NES.

Looking at the franchises, behind Mario the picture is clear. Pokémon is the volume driver: 20 lots of games and themed consoles, for a total of 466,000 dollars. The Legend of Zelda lines up 14 lots for 288,506 dollars. Then there is a gap: the fourth series, Final Fantasy, stops at 62,000.

The auction offers an almost laboratory-like experiment: five sealed copies of the same The Legend of Zelda for NES, PSA-certified, with grades from 8.0 to 9.6. If the grade were everything, the 9.6 should be worth more than all the others. It came in third.

Winning, with $62,500, is the copy with the lowest grade in the group: a PSA 8.0 that, however, bears the NES TM without Rev-A designation, that is, the very first production run of 1987. It is worth almost three times as much as the late-production 9.6, which stopped at $21,250. The rule the market is writing is clear: for historic pieces, the rarity of the variant beats half a point of condition. This is confirmed, on a smaller scale, by a nearly comical lot: Soccer for NES in PSA 6.5, a grade that normally is worth little, sold for $23,750 simply because the box is a hangtab, the version with the tab for hanging the game on store displays, typical of the first distribution.

The cloud of grades tells the rest: the price rises with condition, but the noted exceptions, the average grades paid for at a very high price, are all early production signatures. Grading serves exactly this purpose: to put in black and white not only how beautiful a copy is, but which copy it is.

The Japanese treasure. The most expensive lot outside the Mario universe is a 1996 Pocket Monsters Ao, the Japanese blue version of the first Pokémon, graded PSA 10: 118,750 dollars. The ten Japanese-edition lots in the auction are worth 308,444 dollars altogether, almost a tenth of the total, and are almost all first-generation Pokémon. The niche is small, but per square centimeter it is the most valuable in the auction.

The modern is official. A sealed physical copy of Fortnite for PS4, the 2017 Gearbox edition, reached $55,000 in PSA 10: the twelfth highest overall sale, ahead of dozens of 8-bit and 16-bit classics. Along with Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stories at $42,500, it shows that certified collecting has stopped being an exclusively 1980s affair.

Hardware enters the display case. Seven lots of sealed consoles bring in 110,625 dollars, led by the Japanese third-anniversary Pokémon Game Boy Color at 32,500. And the three European factory boxes, six sealed copies each, add a curious note: the Hagane one for SNES brings in 18,125 dollars and is one of the very few non-American lots in the entire session.

In June PSA dominated value but not volume. In August it dominates both: 88 lots out of 134 and 86.6% of the proceeds. VGA holds its historic territory, sealed and Japanese consoles, with 22 lots; Wata drops to 14, CGC to 6; the four remaining lots, factory-sealed boxes and archive material, went through the room without certification. Over the course of three auctions, the high-end market chose its reference standard.

Reading for TGM. Focusing on a single body is not a value judgment on the others: it is the demand for a standard readable by everyone. The value, as the five Zeldas show, is made by the rarity and documentation of the individual copy. It is the principle on which TGMGrading builds its method: a documented and repeatable judgment, not a stamp.

NES and Nintendo 64 together are worth 1.98 million, 62% of the auction: the former for breadth, 48 lots, the latter for density, 15 top-profile lots. Behind them, Game Boy stands at $514,000 thanks to Japanese Pokémon and the Super Mario Land podium finish, then the broad body of the SNES, 25 accessible lots. The geography remains American: US editions are worth 89.5% of the total, Japan 9.7%, Europe less than 1%. For European collecting, the gap to fill, and the space to occupy, remain enormous: this is the position The Games Market has chosen to hold.

Placed side by side, the three Heritage 2026 sessions look like three different markets. March was the volume auction: 317 lots at an average of $6,269, the deep inventory of collecting. June was the trophy auction: 157 lots inflated to an average of $32,151 by a single $3 million hit. August is the balance auction: the fewest lots ever, 134, but an average of $23,835 built without superstars, with the highest median of the year.

The point. A market that depends on a single object is fragile by definition. A market that brings in 3.19 million with a top lot at 450,000 and places 67 lots at ten thousand dollars and up is proving the opposite: active buyers at every level and prices sustained by the depth of demand, not by the exception. Between June and August, revenue falls, but the quality of the revenue rises.

1. The value has shifted from the summit to the body. The band between ten and fifty thousand dollars is the real protagonist: 55 lots, 1.21 million, 38% of the auction. It is there that the price of serious collecting is formed today, and it is there that one understands where the market is heading.

2. The variant beats the grade. An early-production Zelda 8.0 that almost triples a late 9.6, a Soccer 6.5 at 23,750 dollars: the market pays for the copy's history, not just its condition. Knowing how to read production signatures is literally worth tens of thousands of dollars.

3. Certification is the language of the market. All relevant lots are sealed and graded, and the concentration on a dominant standard shows how much buyers want a single, legible point of reference. Grading does not describe value: it makes it tradable.

Grading does not describe value: it makes it exchangeable.

An auction without million-dollar records that keeps the three-million turnover, doubles the median and gives the podium to only one saga is not a market that is slowing down: it is a market that is maturing. In August 2026, certified video game collecting showed its most mature side, the one in which the strength of the price list matters more than the headline. And in this phase of maturity, the place to catalog, certify and trade with the same rigor is exactly what The Games Market is building for Europe.