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Image: Nintendo

Update: The auction ended at a staggering $660,000.

Original Story [Thu 25th Mar, 2021 16:45 GMT]: Remember last year, when we reported that a sealed copy ofSuper Mario Bros. on the NES sold for an eye-watering $114,000 at auction? Well, there's another copy being auctioned at the moment which currently stands at $310,000 – and it still has seven days remaining before the auction closes.

Assuming that the price rises in the next few days, there's a very real chance that a copy of one of the most common NES games will become the most expensive video game collectable of all time, surpassing even the Nintendo PlayStation – of which there is currently only one known unit on the open market.

For the sake of comparison, there are 40.24 million copies of Super Mario Bros. in the world (not including the re-releases).

Like the one which sold for $114,000, this edition has a cardboard hang tab, but is a later production run. Here's what makes it so special:

Not only is this the finest plastic-sealed copy with a perforated cardboard hangtab we’ve ever offered of any black box title, it is also the oldest sealed copy of Super Mario Bros.we’ve ever had the opportunity to offer. This is only the fourth version of Super Mario Bros. ever produced, and its window of production was remarkably short. Just to paint a better picture of how short this really was — the nationwide release for the console came in mid to late 1986, and black box games distributed for that release did not have the “Game Pak NES-GP” code. It’s worth mentioning that Nintendo managed to add the trademark symbol to the Nintendo Entertainment System on their game boxes by the beginning of 1987. That certainly doesn’t leave much time at all for this variant to be produced in-between the two!

[source twitter.com]