Only Known Sealed First-Production Mario Bros. Sells for $450,000 at Heritage Auctions

The only known sealed first-production copy of Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System has sold for $450,000 at Heritage Auctions. The PSA 9.2 A++ sealed copy sold August 28 as part of Heritage’s Video Games Signature Auction. The final price includes Heritage’s 25% buyer’s premium, putting the winning bid at $360,000.

The sale follows CollectiblesNews.com’s August 14 preview of the game, which highlighted it as one of the most important pieces in Heritage’s August 28-29 auction. What separates this copy from other sealed Mario Bros. games is its first-production status. The box carries Nintendo’s early gloss sticker seal, a packaging format used before the company transitioned to shrinkwrap. Heritage says it is the only certified sealed example of this particular Mario Bros. variant known to exist.

That rarity puts it in unusual territory even among early Nintendo games. Heritage notes that three sealed gloss-sticker copies of Super Mario Bros. are known, while only one sealed gloss-sticker Mario Bros. has surfaced. The game traces back to Nintendo’s second NES test market in Los Angeles in February 1986. Mario Bros. itself originated as a 1983 arcade game created by Shigeru Miyamoto and became an important step in the development of Nintendo’s most famous characters.

The arcade game gave Mario a starring role under his own name and introduced Luigi. It also helped establish several gameplay ideas that would later become familiar parts of the Super Mario Bros. series, including jumping attacks, turtle-like enemies and kicking shells.

The $450,000 cartridge also comes from the Wisconsin Collection, a major sealed-video-game discovery from the early 2010s. The same collection produced one of the three known sealed gloss-sticker copies of Super Mario Bros., connecting the newly sold Mario Bros. to one of the most closely followed groups of early Nintendo games to reach the collecting market.

As CollectiblesNews.com noted when the game was announced for auction, Heritage positioned the copy as a follow-up to another major early Nintendo sale earlier this year. A PSA 9.6 A++ first-production Super Mario Bros. sold for a record $3 million at Heritage in June. The Mario Bros. result does not approach that seven-figure price, but its $450,000 sale firmly establishes it as one of the most valuable video games ever sold and put it at the top of the Video Games Signature Auction. Unlike many high-end video game collectibles where several comparable graded examples exist, this copy currently stands alone.