The Nintendo Entertainment System was one of the finest gaming consoles in history. I cut my teeth on the original “Final Fantasy,” “The Legend of Zelda,” “Contra,” “Super Mario Bros. 3,” and various iterations of the Mega Man franchise. I could (and still can) beat “Marble Madness” and “Paperboy.” “Nintendo hard” became a mantra in the late ’80s and early ’90s based on the difficulty of many of the titles. The gameplay had to be solid because you sure weren’t sticking around at that point for the quality of the graphics.
I sort of missed out on the Super Nintendo and the Nintendo 64 later in childhood because I was still playing the NES (my parents were too cheap to spring for more-advanced consoles, figuring one video game machine per household was enough). I certainly had enough dorky friends who acquired other consoles though to know that beloved video games continued to roll out in the wake of the side-scrollers that I still have memorized.
Now that I’ve established my vintage gamer bona fides, hopefully you realize I’m not some fusty baby boomer who doesn’t think anything with a digital component can be art. I know and love a lot of the same vintage video games that are going for hundreds of thousands, and now even millions, of dollars in collectibles marketplaces. It’s because of that love, not in spite of it, that I can say definitively that this trend of selling pristine vintage game cartridges for obscene sums has gotten completely absurd.
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On July 11, a copy of “Super Mario 64” sold at auction for a record $1.56 million, including fees. “Super Mario 64” was a hugely popular title released in 1996 for the Nintendo 64 console. This particular record-setting “Super Mario 64” video game cartridge was still sealed, and it received the highest condition grade possible of A++ from the video game condition grading company WataGames — video game condition grading companies are apparently a thing. According to the auction house Heritage, based in Dallas, it was the first time a video game cartridge had sold for more than $1 million.
The record-setting cartridge sale came just two days after an unopened copy of “The Legend of Zelda” for NES sold at auction for what was then a record of $870,000. Given that it only took two days to break the previous sale price record for a single video game cartridge, and that the new record price was almost double that of its predecessor, it is reasonable to assume that the $1.56 million record set by this “Super Mario 64” cartridge will itself be smashed in short order.
This is all very sad and weird. Sure, people have been complaining about the collectibles market in sealed action figures for decades now. (“But you don’t even get to play with them!”) At least with a sealed action figure you can gaze through the plastic and enjoy the detail of the sculpting and the artistry of the paint job.
With a sealed video game, you get nothing. What makes the game the game, and what makes it an important (intangible) historical object, is the gameplay. Someone who buys a collectible video game for over a million bucks in hopes of the value increasing even further is not going to open it and play it. The cartridge, if it is sealed, might as well not even contain circuitry. It could be an empty plastic game cartridge casing sealed in shrink-wrap that just sold for $1.56 million, and that would be equally as good as the actual item for all intents and purposes.
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You wouldn’t buy the “Mona Lisa” if it was eternally encased in a cement block. But that’s essentially what you’re doing if you buy a video game that can never leave the shrink-wrap. Like I did myself, many people spent days, months, years of childhood peering through half-inch thick glasses to steer Mario and Luigi through a series of obstacles. But you’re not going to recapture that by spending millions on an unopenable and unremarkable plastic game casing. Go buy an NES Classic Edition for crying out loud.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].