Games need to be protected from UV rays, which can cause fading on the package design and lower the value. In order to keep games in good condition, collectors will often store them in safety deposit boxes at a bank or in plexiglass cases. Copies up for sale are often graded based on their condition by companies like Wata Games, which evaluated the Super Mario 64 cartridge for Monday’s auction. In either case, the games have to be kept in pristine condition. So what do you do with a video game worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more? There’s almost no chance that any of these collectors are actually playing these games rather, they’re keeping them as trophies in their private collections or waiting to resell them at a later date for a profit. What Should I Do With My Anti-COVID Spray? Thus, there’s currently more of an imbalance between supply and demand for unsealed vintage video games.įacebook May Be on the Cusp of an Embarrassing Milestone Unlike with collectibles like action figures, there hasn’t traditionally been a culture around keeping video games untarnished and in their original packaging-most of the time, people are buying a game to open and play. “There are other copies of game that are earlier prints of these popular franchises that, if this trend holds true, should sell for more than $1.5 million.” One of the main reasons why these vintage video games have shot up in price so quickly is that there just aren’t that many unsealed versions up for sale. There’s a really high-grade sticker seal Mario that should sell for more than this,” said Brock. “If this is the true price, there’s copies of The Legend of Zelda that should sell for more than this.
Indeed, given that Super Mario 64 has already sold for well over a million and that there are arguably more valuable titles out there, it’s likely that this won’t be the only seven-figure video game auction. Hamblin said, though, that the particular nostalgia that this obviously well-heeled collector had for Nintendo 64 Mario may have been a driving factor in the high sale price. “N64 Mario kind of gets a bad rap with a lot of collectors as not being a great game.” He noted he would’ve expected the NES game The Legend of Zelda, which just sold for $870,000 in an auction on Friday, to be more valuable than Super Mario 64. “It’s really shocking that it was this game,” said Hamblin. This, combined with the fact that there are scarcer titles than Super Mario 64, has many collectors confused about why it was the one to break the $1 million ceiling. Though Super Mario 64 features Mario’s first 3D rendering, the character had starred in numerous console games before that and first appeared in Donkey Kong. As is the case with comic books, the titles that feature the first appearances of characters from well-known franchises like Super Mario, Zelda, and Pokémon are the most coveted. The titles that are fetching the highest prices are typically Nintendo games from the 1980s and 1990s, especially those for the company’s NES console, which came out in 1983. Hamblin also said that collectors are usually people in their late 30s or 40s who grew up with these games and now “have the extra money to play around with some collectibles.” His business used to consist mostly of people coming to “buy some games to play for the weekend,” but he’s recently found that collector’s items have become a significant portion of the store’s revenue and have been taking up more of his time. “You tend to see some increases in buying games when cryptocurrency is doing really well, and sometimes it corrects a little bit as that goes down,” said Josh Hamblin, owner of the SideQuest Games store in Portland, Oregon. There also seems to be a tendency among cryptocurrency investors to cash out and collect video games. A large contingent of comic-book collectors, for instance, have been moving into the space over the past few years in an attempt to diversify their investments. There are several trends that have converged to fuel this rapid rise in vintage video-game speculation.