Japan in 140 Lots

The catalog is dominated by a single grader: 104 lots out of 140 are VGA, the body that in the United States built its archive on Japanese sealed items. Around that, twenty-one themed edition consoles, from Pokémon to Zelda to Gundam, and nine multi-lots. As always, we reconstructed the auction lot by lot: title, platform, certification, and winning bid of all 140 pieces are in the attached spreadsheet.

The top lot accounts for 8% of the take, the top three 19%, and the top ten 34%. Two thirds of the money lie outside the top ten: a low pyramid, as in all the Showcases, but with an unusually broad base.

The distribution is the most open of the year. Thirty lots under five hundred dollars, the highest number among the Showcases; 43 between one thousand and two thousand; 25 between two and five thousand, which by themselves account for a third of the total takings; and three above ten thousand, the two Pokémon Game Boy and the tenth-anniversary DS Lite, for 19%. Certified Japanese ranges from 94 to 17,500 dollars in the same room.

By platform, the Game Boy leads with a median of $1,625, thanks to Pocket Monsters and Kirby; the Game Boy Color sits at $1,375, the Nintendo 64 at $1,375, with Famicom, Disk System, DS, and 3DS ranging between $1,156 and $1,250. At the bottom is the Super Famicom: twenty-one lots with a median of $450; the sealed Japanese 16-bit catalog is the most accessible part of the auction.

$17,500 for Pokémon Card GB2: Great Rocket-Dan Sanjō!, the 2001 sequel to the Game Boy Color card game, in VGA 90: the most expensive lot in the auction. The first Pokémon Card GB, in the same session and in VGA 90+, fetched $525. A thirty-three-fold difference between a title released only in Japan and never localized, and its predecessor distributed worldwide. Behind it, Pocket Monsters Midori in VGA 90 at $15,000, and a Pokémon 10th Anniversary Nintendo DS Lite that, in VGA 70+, the lowest grade in the auction, reaches $10,000.

$17.500  Absolute record · Lot #80070. Pokémon Card GB2: Great Rocket-Dan Sanjō!, VGA 90 Unopened. Game Boy Color, 2001. A title never released outside Japan, in the grade that the Japanese market pays the most for.

$15.000  Second · Lot #80058. Pocket Monsters Midori, VGA 90 Unopened. Game Boy, 1996. The green version of the first Pokémon, the one that the West never got. In July, at the Nintendo Showcase, a copy in VGA 85 sold for 8.750.

$10.000  Third · Lot #80114. Nintendo DS Lite Console, VGA 70+ Qualified, tenth anniversary Pokémon edition. 2006. The lowest bid in the auction on the third sale: the console counts, the number does not.

Pokémon accounts for 40%. Twenty-six lots of titles and themed consoles, for $88,688, 40% of the auction, with a median of 2,094: fifteen titles for $61,400, ten consoles and one multi-lot for the remainder. Only Mario in August’s Signature, at 42%, weighed more in a Heritage session in 2026. Mario follows with eighteen lots for $27,563, Zelda with eleven for $17,444; then Fire Emblem, Kirby, Dragon Quest and Gundam, all between eight thousand and nine thousand dollars.

Two Pocket Monsters Ao, same title, same console: the mail-order version, first production, in VGA 85+ fetches 6,875 dollars; the store version with the barcode, late production, in VGA 85, stops at 2,625. Half a grade point and a distribution variant are worth 2.6 times. Two Zelda no Densetsu for Disk System: the first production with yellow text in CGC 9.0 brings in 4,750, the late production with white text in CGC 8.5, sold together with a complete Super Mario Bros., 2,750.

Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 closes the circle: the sealed copy in the Deluxe Pack graded VGA 85 goes for $4,000, while the complete-in-box copy graded CGC 9.2 goes for 400. Ten times as much for a seal, even with a higher numerical grade on the open copy. And the VGA scale, across 104 lots, does not determine prices: the 58 lots graded VGA 85 and 85+ have a median of $1,250, the 36 graded VGA 90 and 90+ of $1,188, the five graded 95 of $1,125. On sealed Japanese copies, the grade is almost irrelevant: what matters is the title, the variant, and the themed console.

Twenty-one consoles. The themed-edition consoles are worth $40,863, 19% of the auction, with a median of 1,313, higher than that of the games. Fourteen are DS and 3DS: from the 10th-anniversary DS Lite at 10,000 to the 3DS LL Lizardon and Pikachu Yellow between 2,000 and 2,400, and then the Zelda and Fire Emblem editions under a thousand. The Pokémon Center Game Boy Advance SP Pikachu fetches 3,750, the GameCube in Char’s colors, with its WaveBird controller at 1,625, 3,250.

Gundam is worth as much as Kirby. Five Gundam-themed lots, Char's console and controller, the SP SD Gundam, two Famicom Mini and Dimension War for Virtual Boy, make $8,081: as much as the five Kirby and the four Dragon Quest. A saga without flagship titles that is valued for its special editions.

The $94 Sonic. At the bottom of the ranking, three CGC lots graded 9.9 and 9.8 under two hundred dollars: Sonic Jam for Saturn at 94, Nazo no Murasame Jō for Disk System in 8.5 at 99, Ikaruga for GameCube at 179. The seventeen CGC lots in the auction have a median of 550 dollars, less than half that of the VGA ones: on Japanese titles, the American market buys the stamp it knows.

VGA certifies 104 lots out of 140 and 85% of the proceeds: $186,124. It is the highest share by a single grading company in all the Heritage sessions of 2026. CGC follows with seventeen lots and 8%, the sixteen uncertified lots, mainly multi-lots and CIB Mega Drive, make up 6%; Wata and PSA appear with three lots in total. On sealed Japanese, the American market has only one standard.

Reading for TGM. An agency at 85% and a score that does not order prices: two signals that, for Japanese items, the stamp serves to certify the authenticity of the seal more than to grade condition. It is exactly where a documented method makes the difference: stating which copy it is, not just how beautiful it is. It is the principle on which TGMGrading builds its work.

Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance together are worth $92,001, 42% of the auction, across 38 lots: Game Boy alone brings in $40,632 from fourteen lots. The Famicom, with the Disk System, reaches $36,874 across 27 lots; the Super Famicom $24,281 across twenty-one; DS and 3DS, almost entirely consoles, $28,225 across sixteen. GameCube and Nintendo 64 finish between $10,000 and $14,000. Sega, WonderSwan, PSP and Virtual Boy remain under three thousand dollars each.

Arranged in sequence, the nine Heritage video game sessions of 2026 tell the story of two markets. The three Signature sales, 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 six Showcase sales, from January to September, are between 98,000 and 230,000 dollars with medians between 938 and 1,313. This is the first by number of lots, 140, the second by proceeds after the Nintendo sale in July, but with a median of 1,000 dollars exactly: many pieces, many in the three figures, only three above ten thousand.

The point. An auction of 140 Japanese lots with a median of one thousand dollars says that collecting Japanese catalog items is deep, not just rare. The three five-figure records are all Pokémon; below, 137 lots map out the price list of a market that buys Famicom, Game Boy, and themed consoles at entry-level collector prices.

1. On Japanese games, the grade does not determine prices. VGA 85, 90, and 95 have nearly identical medians: what matters is the title, the distribution variant, and the console edition. Those who buy Japanese buy a catalog, not a ladder.

2. The themed consoles are a market of their own. Twenty-one consoles for 19% of the auction, with a median higher than the titles and a DS Lite in 70+ at ten thousand dollars: the special edition beats the grade, always.

3. Pokémon is forty percent. Twenty-six lots for 88,688 dollars, the three auction records and the highest median among the sagas: on Japanese, the first generation of Pokémon is the unit of measure for everything else.

Who buys Japanese buys a catalog, not a ladder.

An auction of $220,000 with 140 lots in a single language is not a niche: it is the second-highest grossing among the Showcase events of the year. By February 2026, Japanese catalog collecting has a deep market, a benchmark institution, and prices that start in the double digits. Bringing this depth to Europe, with the same documentation and the same rigor, is the work that The Games Market is building.