Japan Doubles Down

Heritage Auctions' Showcase 44350, closed on October 8, is the second 2026 session devoted entirely to Japan, after 44339 in February. Same format, same scope: Japanese editions only, from Famicom to PlayStation 4, plus seven shikishi (Japanese autograph boards) signed by Nintendo and Game Freak authors, and a 1986 tin bento box. A reminder for context, as always: Heritage is the major Texas auction house, prices are in dollars, and the buyers are largely American. We read it from Europe because the United States remains the reference market for video game collecting, and these sessions are its barometer.

The numbers change scale compared to February: 88 lots versus 140, but proceeds of 300,369 dollars versus 219,820. 37% fewer lots, 37% more money. The average per lot more than doubled, from 1,570 to 3,413 dollars, the median rises from 1,000 to 1,125. It is the richest Showcase of the year, in terms of proceeds and average, and the first to exceed 300,000 dollars. As always, we reconstructed the auction lot by lot: title, platform, certification and hammer price of all 88 pieces are in the attached spreadsheet.

In sealed video game auctions, value concentrates at the top, but here the top weighs as much as in a Signature: the top lot is worth 12% of the proceeds, the top three 30%, and the top ten 64%. This is the highest concentration among the seven Showcases of the year: in the other six, the top ten had stayed between 27% and 51%. The other 78 lots account for 36%: a two-tier auction, with nine trophies above ten thousand dollars and a body of collectibles below.

The distribution by brackets confirms it. The nine lots from ten thousand dollars upward account for 61% of the total; the three between five and ten thousand another 8%. Below, the everyday market: 14 lots between two thousand and five thousand dollars, 23 between one thousand and two thousand, 23 between five hundred and one thousand and 16 under five hundred: these last ones, together, do not reach 2% of the proceeds. Forty-nine lots out of 88 reach at least one thousand dollars.

How much does the typical lot cost, platform by platform? The Famicom Disk System stands apart: three lots, median $12,500, two Zelda and one Super Mario Bros. 2. Then the Game Boy at 4,125, driven by the four Pocket Monsters, the Nintendo 64 at 3,250 and the Game Boy Color at 2,375. The seven shikishi have a median of $1,500; the cartridge Famicom, the most numerous platform with 17 lots, stops at 1,000. Super Famicom, GameCube and PlayStation are between $600 and $850: the Japanese 16-bit costs less than the 8-bit and a fifth of the Game Boy.

35,000 dollars for Zelda no Densetsu: The Hyrule Fantasy, the original 1986 Famicom Disk System release, certified CGC 9.0 with A+ seal, first production with the yellow Disk System lettering. It is the highest sale ever recorded in a 2026 Showcase: the previous record was 17,500 dollars, reached twice, in January and February. Behind it, tied at 27,500, a title and an autograph: Makaimura, the Japanese original of Ghosts ’n Goblins, in the copy with the highest VGA census grade, and Shigeru Miyamoto's shikishi with Mario and the fire flower.

$35.000  Absolute record · Lot #79009. Zelda no Densetsu: The Hyrule Fantasy, CGC 9.0 A+ Sealed, yellow Disk System text, first production. Famicom Disk System, 1986. The first Zelda in its original form, on disk, sealed.

$27.500  Second · Lot #79010. Makaimura, VGA 90 Unopened. Famicom, 1986. Capcom in Japanese edition, the highest VGA census grade for this title: a preservation record, not just a price record.

$27,500  Second place tie · Lot #79088. Signed shikishi by Shigeru Miyamoto with Mario and the fire flower, 2004, PSA-authenticated signature. It is not a video game: it is a drawing signed by its creator, and it is worth as much as Makaimura.

The shikishi make up a fifth. Seven autograph cards signed by creators from Nintendo and Game Freak are worth a combined $61,800, 21% of the auction, with a median of 1,500. Three are among the top nine lots: Miyamoto at 27,500, Satoshi Tajiri (the creator of Pokémon) at 18,750, Yoshio Sakamoto with Metroid and Samus Aran at 11,875. The other four do not exceed $1,500: Kazumi Totaka with K.K. Slider, Hironobu Yoshida with Drill Dozer, two Masamichi Abe with Pikmin and Metroid at 500 and 425. The signature is authenticated by PSA, but it is not a grade: it is a verification of authenticity, and the value comes from the name. Added to these is the 1986 Super Mario Bros. tin bento box, $1,250 for one of the first Super Mario merchandising items.

Looking at the sagas, three names make up 56% of the auction. Pokémon leads with 12 lots for 63,125 dollars, 21% of the total and a median of 4,375: the four Pocket Monsters for Game Boy alone are worth 42,750. Zelda follows with seven lots for 56,969 dollars, 19%, thanks to the two discs; Mario with nine lots and 46,877 dollars, 15.6%, counting Miyamoto’s shikishi and the bento box. Dragon Quest is fourth with three lots, but 21,250 of its 21,975 dollars come from a single piece. Final Fantasy, five lots, does not exceed 6,169 dollars.

Two copies of Pocket Monsters Snap for Nintendo 64, same 1999 edition, both Unopened: the VGA 95 fetches 4,750 dollars, the VGA 90 stops at 1,750. Five grading points, a factor of 2.7. It is the clearest case in the auction in which the grade determines the price. Elsewhere, the grade does not dictate: Final Fight in VGA 85+ goes for 938 dollars, Final Fight Guy in VGA 90 goes for 513; Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance in VGA 90 and Metal Gear Solid 3 in VGA 85+ both close at 625; Tetris for Famicom in VGA 90 is worth three times as much as Tetris for Game Boy in VGA 80+. And where series and grade coincide, the price coincides too: Crash Bandicoot 2 and Crash Bandicoot 3, same VGA 85+ certification, 1,375 dollars each.

The cloud of grades tells the rest. On the VGA scale, three-quarters of the titles fall between 85+ and 90+, and the medians of 85+, 90 and 90+ are almost flat: $938, $1,094 and $1,156. On the CGC scale the order is reversed: the two 9.0s have a median of $18,094 and the two 9.2s of $7,313, because between them sit the two Zelda on disc; the three 9.6s (Double Dragon II, Super Contra and Zelda DX) do not exceed $2,000. The chart has two panels because the scales are different: CGC, PSA and Wata grade in tenths up to 10, VGA in points up to 100. It is the lesson of every Japanese auction: grading certifies the condition, the title and the print run make the price.

Four lots in this auction are CIB, complete with box, cartridge, and manual but opened, and one is a standalone cartridge: five pieces out of 71 single titles (console, shikishi, and bento box excluded), too few for a rule. To measure the weight of the seal, we therefore put together the eight 2026 Heritage sessions that the Observatory cataloged lot by lot (seven Showcase and the Signature 7454 in August): 698 titles, 635 sealed, 60 CIB and three standalone cartridges. Unopened and Unused copies, new but without shrink-wrap, count as sealed. The first figure is surprising. The median CIB, $1,250, and the median sealed, $1,251, are the same, just one dollar apart. Not because the seal does not matter, but because only the CIBs that deserve certification make it to auction: first production runs, launch titles, Pokémon. The average tells the other half of the story: $2,578 for CIB versus $6,186 for sealed, where the trophies from August’s Signature carry weight.

The fair comparison is by title. In 2026 there are 19 titles that have sold at auction both sealed and CIB, on the same platform, 25 CIB copies in total. Title by title, the CIB copy is worth a median of 14% of the sealed copy: for every 100 dollars of sealed, the CIB brings in 14, and opening the box costs six-sevenths of the price. But the spread is enormous, from 4% to 89%, and follows a readable rule. The gap is greatest for the titles that in the Signature sales have become trophies: Final Fantasy II for SNES, CIB in CGC 9.6 at 2,000 dollars against 45,000 for a sealed PSA 9.6 copy; Ice Climber at 5%; Clu Clu Land and Hogan’s Alley at 7%; Super Mario Bros. at 8% with six CIB copies ranging from 1,375 to 31,250 dollars against a median of 37,500 for the sealed copies. There, the sealed market has risen, the CIB market has not.

The gap closes where the sealed copy is not yet a trophy or where the CIB itself is rare. Wild Gunman, PSA 9.6 CIB at 7,813 dollars versus 8,750 for a sealed PSA 9.0: 89%. Ikari Warriors at 84%. And above all Pocket Monsters Aka: the two CIB copies of the year, the first-production CGC 8.5 from this auction at 12,250 and a PSA 8.5 at 12,500 in the August Signature, are worth 79% of the median of the sealed copies. In the October case the comparison is internal to the same room: the first-production CIB, with the large barcode, at 12,250 dollars, and a later-production copy, new and never used, VGA 90+, at 15,625. The variant made up for almost all of the seal. Pocket Monsters Midori, same grade, same first production, instead stops at 5,500, 37% of the sealed copies of the year: first production weighs on red, not on green.

The other three open pieces from this session say how much the title matters. The loose copy of Super Mario RPG, Wata 9.6 and signed by character designer Kazuyuki Kurashima, goes for 625 dollars, 71% of the sealed VGA 85+ copy that sold in February. The two modern CIBs with autographs, Fire Emblem Kakusei for 3DS signed by Yusuke Kozaki and Shining Wind for PS2 signed by Tony Taka and Tsuyoshi Sawada, close at 300 and 169 dollars (the second is the cheapest lot in the auction). In the year, they do not have a sealed copy to compare with: against the median sealed copies in this auction, they are worth between 16% and 29%. The illustrator's signature did not move anything. Two details complete the picture for the year. Japanese CIBs have a median of 813 dollars versus 1,375 for American ones. And they are certified almost only by PSA, Wata and CGC: VGA, which dominates Japanese sealed copies, has only one CIB out of 60.

What we get from this. CIB does not amount to a fixed share of sealed, but rather between 4% and 89%, and the share depends on three variables, in order of importance: how much the sealed version of that title is already worth; whether the opened copy includes a variant that the sealed version does not, such as the first production run of Pocket Monsters; how recent the title is, because with modern releases CIB is worth only a fraction. That is why TGMGrading evaluates complete-in-box as a category in its own right, with a documented assessment of box, cartridge, and manual and the same rigor reserved for sealed copies: the market prices it that way, not as discounted sealed.

Dragon Quest does six times February. The original 1986 VGA 85+ copy takes home $21,250. Eight months earlier, in the February Japanese session, a Dragon Quest in VGA 85 had finished at 3,500. Half a grade point does not explain a factor of six: the room, the timing, and two determined buyers explain more. It is the reminder of every auction: with the same title and nearly the same grade, the price remains an event, not a chart. Dragon Quest IV, CGC 9.4, in the same room, goes for $300.

The Famicom without its trophies. Twenty lots between Famicom and Disk System have a median of 1,219 dollars. But leaving out Makaimura and Dragon Quest, the remaining fifteen Famicom cartridge games are worth 15,588 dollars in total, median 938: Sweet Home, Capcom’s 1989 horror game from which Resident Evil descends, at 2,500; Wrecking Crew in CGC 9.4 at 2,250; Bullet-Proof’s Tetris at 1,563; Super Contra, Ultima and Dragon Quest IV between 300 and 813. The Japanese 8-bit era is a market of a few trophies and many three-digit titles.

One-thousand-dollar Sonic. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 for Mega Drive, VGA 95+, one of only two Japanese copies recorded in the VGA census, stops at 1,000 dollars. Population rarity, on Sega Japan, does not translate into price: the title has an American audience and a European one, but not yet a Japanese one. The same logic applies to PlayStation: 18 lots among PS1, PS2, PS4 and PSP are worth 19,504 dollars, 6.5% of the auction, with a median of 844. Biohazard 2 at 625, Metal Gear Solid 2 at 625, Parasite Eve II at 179.

Consoles are worth little. Seven sealed consoles totaled $11,863, 3.9% of the auction, with a median of $1,500: the Net Yaroze, the 1997 PlayStation development kit in VGA 85+ Qualified, at $3,250, the PlayStation 4 20th Anniversary in VGA 95 at $2,875, the DSi Reshiram & Zekrom with Pokémon White at $1,500. In September, the same DSi in the British edition, VGA 90+, had brought in $3,750: the Japanese version is worth less than half. At the bottom, the camouflage-livery Neo Geo Pocket at $425.

VGA certifies 61 lots out of 88 and 48% of the takings, 144,212 dollars, with a median of 1,000. In February, in the other Japanese session, it was worth 85% of the takings. The difference is made by CGC: just 13 lots, but 84,862 dollars, 28% of the auction and a median of 2,125, because in its cases are the two Zelda on disc, the two first-run CIB Pocket Monsters and Super Mario 64 Shindō. PSA has four lots for 2.4%, Wata two for 0.3%. The gray slice is the fifth of the auction that no grader voted for: the seven shikishi and the bento box, 63,050 dollars.

The reading for TGM. Japanese remains VGA's territory in terms of volume, but the records in this auction bear another stamp. CGC collected 28% of the money with 15% of the lots, PSA and Wata together do not reach 3%. When a market changes grader on its top items, the collector must know how to read two different scales on the same shelf. It is the problem that TGMGrading solves upstream: a single, documented, and repeatable method, readable by both buyer and seller.

Famicom and Disk System are worth $113,963, 38% of the auction; Game Boy, eight lots for $48,188, 16%, with the highest median after the discs, $4,125. Nintendo’s three handhelds (Game Boy, Color and Advance) together make up 20%. The shikishi stand apart at 21%. Everything else, from Super Famicom to PlayStation 4, eleven platforms, is worth just over a fifth: Nintendo 64 at 5.5%, Super Famicom at 3.9%, GameCube at 3.8%, PlayStation 1 at 3.5%. Nintendo platforms, consoles and handhelds, account for 72% of the proceeds.

The geography is one and the same, Japan, but the eras are not. The 14 titles released between 1985 and 1989 are worth $109,594, nearly half of the money spent on titles, with a median of 1,844; the 19 released between 1990 and 1994 are worth $21,938, median 844. The Pokémon years, from 1995 to 1999, rise to $72,098 with 19 titles. From 2000 onward, 19 titles for $20,277 and a median of 625: a third of that of the 1980s.

Lined up, the ten Heritage videogame sessions of 2026 tell the story of two markets. The three Signature sessions, 7452 in March, 7453 in June and 7454 in August, range from two to five million dollars with averages between 6,000 and 32,000. The seven Showcase sessions are between 98,000 and 300,000 dollars with medians between 938 and 1,313. This is the first Showcase to pass 300,000 dollars: the previous record was the 229,664 from the July Nintendo session. The average, 3,413 dollars, exceeds September’s record by 73%, 1,976; the median, 1,125, is third after July and September. In other words: the body of the auction is a normal Showcase, the top end is Signature-level.

The point. Between the two Japanese sessions of the year, the catalog shrank by a third and the money grew by a third. Heritage selected: fewer lots under five hundred dollars, 16 versus 30, and nine trophies above ten thousand, versus three in February. Certified Japanese collecting is no longer a niche by volume: it is a market that has found its cover pieces (Zelda on disk, Makaimura, Dragon Quest, first-production Pocket Monsters) and pays for them like American classics.

1. 8-bit Japan has its own trophies. The first Zelda on disk, Makaimura and Dragon Quest are worth $83,750 together, 28% of the auction. They are the first Japanese lots in a Showcase to compete with the hammer prices of American Signatures: the market has decided which the Japanese classics are.

2. The authors’ autographs entered the auction. Seven shikishi for $61,800, 21%, with Miyamoto at $27,500. They have no grade, they have an authenticated signature and a name. It is a new category for videogame auctions, and it must be read with its own rules: the author matters, then the subject, then the date.

3. CIB is not worth a fixed percentage of sealed. Across 19 2026 titles, the complete in box copy is worth a median of 14% of the sealed copy, but it ranges from 4% for a Final Fantasy II to 89% for a Wild Gunman, and the first-production Pocket Monsters Aka holds 79%. Anyone buying CIB should know how much the sealed version of that title has increased, and whether their copy includes a variant that the sealed version does not have.

On trophies, the seal makes up almost all of the price. On Pocket Monsters Red, the first production recovers almost all of it.

A $300,000 auction with 88 lots in a single language is the clearest signal of the year on Japanese: the small-format Showcase has produced the highest top lot and average in its calendar. In October 2026 these titles have a price, two grading scales on the same shelf, and a demand that pays for trophies like in a Signature. Cataloging, certifying, and trading Japanese titles with the same rigor reserved for American classics is the work that The Games Market is building for Europe.