Unopened Super Mario Bros. Game from 1986 Sells for $660,000
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for FatPhil:
Unopened Super Mario Bros. game from 1986 sells for $660,000:
DALLAS (AP) - An unopened copy of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. that was bought in 1986 and then forgotten about in a desk drawer has sold at auction for $660,000.
[...] The auction house said the video game was bought as a Christmas gift but ended up being placed in a desk drawer, where it remained sealed in plastic and with its hang tab intact until it was found earlier this year.
[...] Heritage said it is the finest copy known to have been professionally graded for auction. Its selling price far exceeded the $114,000 that another unopened copy that was produced in 1987 fetched in a Heritage auction last summer.
Ars Technica elaborates in Sealed Super Mario Bros. shatters record with $660,000 auction sale:
A pristine-condition sealed early copy of Super Mario Bros. sold for a record-shattering $660,000 in an online auction today.
That includes $550,000 to the seller and a $110,000 "Buyers' Premium" paid to Heritage Auctions. The final gavel came after 13 bidders placed 36 distinct bids, including heavy proxy bidding before the live auction commenced Friday afternoon.
The sale obliterates the $156,000 Heritage Auction record for a video game, set by a rare variant of Super Mario Bros. 3 sold last November. Crowdsourced collectibles platform Rally paid $140,000 for a sealed Super Mario Bros. last year, the previous record for that game.
The seller of this sealed copy, who asked to remain anonymous publicly, told Heritage that the game was purchased as a Christmas gift in 1985 and sat untouched at the bottom of a desk drawer for 35 years before being discovered [Update: A representative for Heritage Auctions tells Ars the 1985 date was "an error on our part" and that "The owner must have purchased this game in late 1986"]. "It stayed in the bottom of my office desk this whole time since the day I bought it," the seller told Heritage. "I never thought anything about it."
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