A rare sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. sold for a little more than $30,000 on eBay Wednesday.
An unnamed man who appears to be one of the most dedicated members of the video game fandom world bought the mint condition 1985 game from Pennsylvania-based classic video game trader DKOldies with the winning bid of $30,100.44.
To outsiders, that may seem like a high cost to become the proud owner of a game, but they might not appreciate the most exciting feature, which distinguishes this Nintendo Entertainment System game from all those unwrapped $10 versions: a hangtag on the back that indicates the copy originates from back when video games hung on pegs in stores.
“They said the reason that game went for so much was because Mario was always sold in the system,” CEO Drew Steimel told Mashable quoting the experts of Reddit. “You bought it with the system, it came in the box. This particular copy was from before that happened, before Nintendo decided to bundle them. They only did it for a short time.”
You read that right. No box for this game, hence its final price.
According to Steimel, it’s the most anyone’s forked over for a single game in his experience, and he paid in full. The same aficionado bought other sealed games at the same time, including a copy of Kid Icarus that he ultimately nabbed for $11,000.
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