Sealed Super Mario Bros. Fetches $3 Million at Heritage Auctions, Setting New Vintage Game Record

A sealed copy of the original Super Mario Bros. for the NES sold for $3 million at Heritage Auctions, setting a new record for a vintage video game at auction, according to Heritage Auctions and confirmed by The Verge. The sale was announced on June 12, 2026.

The copy carried a PSA grade of 9.6 — near-mint, but not a perfect 10 — and retained its original sticker, a detail that matters considerably to graders and serious collectors. Condition authentication in the physical collectibles market operates on a tight numeric scale where a single grade point can translate to a meaningful swing in realized price; a 9.6 on a title with Nintendo's name recognition sits at the upper end of what surfaces in the marketplace.

The $3 million figure eclipses the prior high-water mark for a sealed vintage game, a record that itself had been reset multiple times over the past several years as institutional-grade auction houses began treating cartridge-era software as a legitimate collectibles asset class. Heritage, which operates one of the largest collectibles auction platforms in the United States, has been a consistent venue for these benchmark sales.

The broader context here is worth examining. The graded video game market took off in earnest in the early 2020s, borrowing infrastructure — professional grading services, population reports, registry competition — directly from the sports card and coin collecting worlds. PSA's expansion into video game certification gave buyers a standardized vocabulary for condition, and that standardization, more than nostalgia alone, is what unlocked institutional and semi-institutional money. When provenance and grade are verifiable, a $3 million bid becomes a calculable risk rather than a speculative leap.

Super Mario Bros., released in North America in 1985, is the obvious candidate for top-tier valuations in this space. It is among the highest-profile launch titles in console history, universally recognized, and copies in sealed, original condition have grown scarcer as the decades pass. The original sticker variant adds a layer of specificity that collectors prize — different production runs carried different label configurations, and earlier variants command premiums in population-report terms.

Whether the market can sustain prices at this altitude is a fair question. The graded game sector has gone through visible corrections alongside the broader speculative collectibles boom and subsequent cooling that followed the pandemic-era liquidity surge. A $3 million print on a single cartridge will invite scrutiny of whether the underlying demand is durable or whether, as happened with certain graded card sales, a handful of motivated buyers are setting prints that the broader market cannot support long-term. That is not a knock on this particular sale — auction records are set by the intersection of supply, demand, and the right room on the right day — but it is the honest framing for anyone treating this figure as a market baseline.

What is less contestable: the record validates Heritage's positioning in this category and reinforces PSA grading as the de facto certification standard for sealed software. For collectors currently holding high-grade sealed Nintendo titles from the same era, a $3 million ceiling on a 9.6 Super Mario Bros. reshapes their mental model of the ceiling on their own holdings.