I have on the desk in front of me a boxed 25-year-old cartridge of the Nintendo game Super Mario 64. Adored for the hours of joy it generated, it is one of just 11 million copies ever produced.
Apart from being a truly seminal artefact of gaming history, this particular 1996-vintage briquette of Japanese plastic and silicon (label slightly stained with mustard) throbs with sentimental value. It was acquired, along with a Nintendo 64 console, with my first hard-earned pay cheque after I arrived in Tokyo. I have kept it as a nostalgic relic of a happy era. I wouldn’t part with it for anything. Or would I?
The game is out of storage for the first time in decades, not to be played, but to help set straight in my head the fact that last week someone paid $1.56m for something very like this. Or quite like it. But obviously less sullied by adoration, human contact or mustard.
Suddenly, attics around the world are being raided by treasure hunters with similar thoughts. The search, among the hundreds of millions of games long since torn from their packets, played and packed away, is for those that remain unopened.
The money paid by an anonymous bidder for a pristine, never-opened copy of Super Mario 64 at a sale by collectibles specialist Heritage Auctions broke the record for a video game. And that record itself was set only a few days earlier with the sale of a rare 1987 copy of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda, which sold for $870,000. The Mario game was never expected to raise much more than $100,000, and even the auctioneer battled to conceal her surprise when the $1m ceiling was shattered.
By the time it was done, the three-day auction of vintage games, which Heritage says is the first of its kind, had clocked $8.47m in total sales, causing plenty of observers to decide that something is up. But what, precisely?
The hot take is that in a world of weirdness, retro games are in some sort of bubble – the kind of speculative price balloons that appear driven by the Covid-19-related global stimulus and monetary easing and which have recently inflated asset classes from property and small-cap stocks to medicinal cow gallstones and $69m non-fungible token digital collages. The current era of financial markets already feels so odd that the discovery that someone will pay $1.5m for a game they will never play and is rare only for its pristine condition should not really jar.
Even so, the price inflation of old games may have some way to go. As with wine, art, rare coins and other assets that have always drawn pure collectors, the vintage game market could now find itself in that sweet spot where demand from the “natural” market of aficionados is amplified by an influx of hot money that views the targets purely in terms of investment, stored value and potential profit.
Why now? The critical clue here is not macroeconomics, but the way in which the pristine quality of the $1.56m Mario game has been ascribed and certified. The record-breaking game, said Heritage, had scored a 9.8 A++ on the Wata scale – in effect, the highest ranking possible. (A++ is reserved for games that remain sealed as they were when they left the factory. This is “the best condition one would hope to see in a seal”, says Wata.)
Wata’s grading system is overwhelmingly the swing factor. In 2018, the Denver-based company established a standardised system for authenticating and ranking the pristineness and rarity of vintage games, creating at a stroke the kind of quality classification and guarantees that are required for investment money to feel safe and for collectible markets to take off properly.
It’s a familiar pattern. In 1986, the establishment of the Professional Coin Grading Service and its grading system sent the US market for collectible coins into the stratosphere. The same happened some years later for baseball cards and later still for comics. On each occasion, a clear, universally accepted standard was created for assessing the asset and encasing it securely. Within a year or so of that happening, the collectible market would suddenly and sustainably soar – causing new price records to be broken as the acceptability of the standard settled in.
In that light, the $1.56m Super Mario 64 sale is not so much telling us about one collector’s desire for a single game, but rather that the whole market for vintage games has crossed a technical Rubicon which makes it investible by the sort of money that could, conceivably, inflate an asset bubble. My copy, mostly because of the mustard, maybe scores a Wata 5.5 at best.
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Asia business editor
Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first.
