RetroFed
A rare sticker-sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. just sold for $3 million
return2ozma
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Th4tGuyIIAlright, so knowing of the numerous scandels involved in the retro gaming collection market, this is almost certainly either a backdoor deal to inflate value and was never actually sold, or money laundering.
Yeah, this is just more horseshit like all of that Wata nonsense was a few years ago. All garbage like this does is damage the hobby for us normal people.
A_Random_IdiotWhat wata nonsense?
The I dont really follow physical retrogaming, outside of seeing games I missed as a kid in used game stores and wanting to play them.. but not being able to because its being sold for 200 dollars for a bare cart with sharpie across the back and i dont care if I have President Bribing money, I aint paying 200 dollars for that shit.
Isn’t the whole game collectable rating and pricing system massively inflated by a few “totally not related” authorities, or am I misremembering?
That’s pretty disgusting when you think about what else could be accomplished with that kind of money
missingnoAh yes, SMB1, a game so rare they only printed 30 million copies.
Capt. WolfGoing to point out that actual boxed copies of just Super Mario Bros. Is actually on the more rare side, since it was quickly bundled with the NES and the version with Duck Hunt came out pretty quickly.
It may have sold 30 million copies, but a large majority of them are either the Duck Hunt combo or the one with Duck Hunt and World Class Track Meet. Kinda the same way Stadium Events is that much more rare because of the bundled, renamed version.
That being said, people have too much fucking money…
Yeah, I didnt even know until just now that there was a retail package release of Super Mario Bros, by itself, without duckhunt.
cause I thought it was just a packin game with the nes.
I can see why its rare, but its stupid that someone paid 3 million for it.
Only reason I know is because I’ve been collecting since I was a kid. I’ve got three loose copies, shame they’re not worth anything… I’d be happy to separate some stupid people from their money.
yeah.
I feel the same way about all my 1st and 2nd gen pokemon games, open, but complete in box.
I’ll probably never play the physical games again, since emulation is so much easier (and eats less batteries)..but on the otherhand, they are childhood memories and its not something i want to hand over to some greedy fuckwit whose just gonna sit on them for 6 months and flip them for 30% profit.
Endymion_MallornUtterly ridiculous.That’s a copy of a game that will never get played. It’s utterly useless and ridiculous.
Then again, the important part of that cartridge has been perfectly emulated for a while. The only value of it has been rereleased on SNES, GBC, GBA, 3DS, and Switch.
Genuinely, why would anyone want this? Why wouldn’t you want the cartridge with Duck Hunt, too? Or All-Stars (with SMW if possible)? Or thr handheld versions?
Genuinely, why would anyone want this?
Nobody involved cares about the game. What happens is you sell it to yourself, thus “proving” it’s worth that much, then sell it to some schmuck who thinks the value will be increasing in time.
….. And money laundering. I want to pay you to do a crime. You do the crime. Now you can’t put “earned by crime” in the sheet for the IRS (actually you can) and thus we find something you own that is that much money worth to me. But IRS knows all the tricks in the book, so we both need something very “rare” and a corruptable appraiser and now I can buy that “rare” game you never unpacked from your childhood at that price. And badabing badaboom, money laundered. Ah also all my other criminal friends now can use this rare collectors item as a vehicle to get payed by me because its reusable. And now you also understand most of the art trade.
thingsiplayThey pay for the seal, not for the game. Makes it even more ridiculous.
It’s not perfectly emulated. It’s emulated close enough that there aren’t any currently known useful glitches that aren’t emulated.
That said, it’s still ridiculous.
CalaveraEverything related to collectionism is either some scam or money laundering done by rich people or over consumerism done by regular people.
Both sickens me
I see it as on par with buying art, or a relic. Sure that 3rd century goblet can be drank out of, but that’s not why someone buys it. The argument I hear in my head is that “it’s a part of history.” While true, I don’t think it’s worth that to have in a private collection, but I could see its value in being displayed by a public institution. (I’m not defending the price, just the view that it does have value.)
Okay, but I’d say with the goblet, it’s got purely artistic value because someone made it by hand and might be unique. Cartridges are machine made and the box artwork is mass-produced.
With sealed stuff that was never opened before, I wonder how to make sure the inside is not a fake?
It’s like those diamond dealers who would sell you diamonds in a sealed pouch and “guaranteed” their value as long as you never open to the pouch. It was a scam tantamount to NFTs.
Ⓜ3️⃣3️⃣ 🌌
I like how it’s only graded 9.6. I take it a true perfect 10 grade must be worth infinity dollars. It’s like warp speeds!
nicpicnameThis phenomena is spreading to Manga, too. Mind you, magazines with paper the equivalent of toilet paper.
ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86
Fuck WATA for trending this bullshit. Like sure, it might’ve been a thing that was already going, but when WATA got into the picture, they amped it up. So now we’ve been seeing these people run around just securing their collections in little cases, getting little stickers and they’re going around artificially inflating the value as to what to sell games by.
When, WATA has been shown to be operated by a bunch of hedgefund cronies that are definitely running money laundering schemes and are in court over things.
If you’re an aspiring collector and you buy one of these kinds of games, you’re the fool.
why
Money laundering? 🤷♂️
Yeah, probably some form of wash trading.
Pricing of “collectibles” never makes any sense…
Fraud
People like collecting things.
If it is Heritage Auctions and WATA then it is corruption. This game is never worth that amount and no one has actually bought it for that amount it is just an ongoing scam and any “publication” reporting on this trash as if it were anything else should also be considered compliant of this obvious market manipulation bullshit.
And it still plays exactly the same as any other copy. You’ll need to blow into the cartridge just like everyone else
Its sealed so would be funny if was defective and didn’t even play at all.
Of course, no one would ever know because this thing will probably never be opened and even less likely to be played
Kinda sad, poor little cartridge :-(.
The article seems to imply the game was never sold with a factory seal, so this was sealed after the fact for some reason. Seems extra fishy to me.
I suppose a cartridge of just SMB1 is somewhat rare; anyone I knew who had an NES had the Super Mario / Duck Hunt multicart, or very occasionally Super Mario / Duck Hunt / Track & Field triple game cartridge from the bundle that included the Power Pad.
Seems rare-ish, very skeptical about $3 million rare but I guess the selling point is more about that particular cartridge being distributed with the Nintendo sticker seal vs the plastic shrinkwrap most cartridges had later on?
You got me thinking about that, you’re probably talking about what Nintendo called the Action Set bundle, or the Power Set after that, when they were including those dual/triple game paks.
My own was the earlier bundle, what Nintendo called the Deluxe Set, that one came with two separate games (Duck Hunt and Gyromite). We had to buy SMB separately.. definitely don’t remember if it had a sticker vs shrinkwrap.
Wikipedia mentions the different NES bundles back then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System#Bundles_and_redesigns
Why can’t I just randomly find something like that in my attic?
Because your house is probably shit like mine
I’m more likely to find expired meth which a dung Beatle carried in
Does meth even expire? Never thought about that
I don’t believe these boxes actually have the game till they are opened. Secondly, back in April, Yaamava Casino claimed to be giving away as a prize, a unopened copy of Mario Bros. The thing that pissed me off was in all the advertising (including television), they would never say the name of the game. They just showed a image of the box and referred to it as a “cartridge classic”. IF YOU WON’T SAY THE FUCKING GOD DAMN NAME THEN I DON’T FUCKING BELIEVE YOU ACTUALLY HAVE THAT GAME!
Schrödinger’s cartridge.
There’s always x-rays
Well, of course it’s going to be there if you scan the inside.
For real, or just for a little pump and dump action by some bad actor again?
Was it the founder of Wata selling to another founder of Wata who is buying the game as a group purchase with the other founding members of Wata - again?
I thought all of this speculative market around preserved game boxes was dead, but I see it isn’t. I hope we get past this, let it die, and just keep being dead.
It never will be.
This asset can be used as collateral for leverage. So now the owner has it, they can use it to put up maybe around $30,000,000 if they have a good enough relationship with a broker.
Because of the way America is right now too, they can give trump a 10m cut if he slides a particular stock one way or another.
President gets 10m, punter gets got knows how much, and nobody is any the wiser.
It’s the same with art, but with art, it’s a lot more speculative, which is why you have so many god awful contemporary pieces, because again they’ll pay an appraiser to say it’s worth 100m when it’s a handful of beans on a canvas, and then use that as collateral.
These are just infinite money glitches for the rich.
In all seriousness, there’s nothing stopping you and your friends and their families from doing the same thing, but because it’s not the system they designed they’re going to be skeptical of it and not want to do that.
Infinite money glitches for the rich is well said, but they should be mindful that too many glitches will cause the system to come… crashing down.
As in if the rich just keep getting richer and inflation keep getting worse, soon it’ll be like Ireland during the Great Hunger, but fucking everywhere. Because the potato blight wasn’t even the worst thing back then for the Irish, the British government was.
Hmm I wonder of there are any good movies about it actually. Probably not because the BBC wouldn’t make them. Like 1800-1930 set period pieces about politics in Ireland. Suggestions, anyone?