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Unopened 1985 Super Mario Bros. video game sells for record $2 million

You could be rich, too, if only you'd left your toys unopened and never used them to have a fun childhood.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, and generational studies Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
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Gael Cooper
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If only you'd kept this cartridge, and never, ever opened it...

 Rally

This Mario is really Super. On Friday, collectibles site Rally announced that someone paid $2 million for an unopened 1985 Super Mario Bros. video game cartridge, setting a world record. That sale breaks the record set less than a month ago, when an anonymous buyer at Heritage Auctions paid $1.56 million for a 25-year-old copy of Super Mario 64. 

"A NEW WORLD RECORD on Rally w/ the $2,000,000 sale of our 1985 Super Mario Bros., marking the HIGHEST PRICE EVER PAID for a video game of any title," the site announced in a tweet. 

While the previous record was set on an auction site, Rally has a different system, buying items and inviting people to invest in shares of those items. When an offer comes in on an item, investors vote on whether to sell or hold.  

"The (video game) space is incredibly hot right now," a representative for Rally said. Three thousand shares in the Super Mario Bros. game were originally offered to investors at a total value of $150,000 in August 2020. 

It's a profitable sale for sure. The New York Times reports that Rally bought the game in April 2020 for $140,000, and that investors passed on a $300,000 offer later that year. A graduate student who spoke to the newspaper said he invested $100 in shares of the game and made $950 from the sale.

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