Guides · The vault
Prices checked July 2026 · hammer prices in US$ · sterling at US$1 ≈ £0.74 · sales date from 2020–22
Search for the rarest video games and you will mostly find lists of the most expensive ones — but the two are not the same thing. Rarity is a fact about supply: how many copies survive. Price is a fact about a moment: what condition the copy is in, how many people want it, and what else is happening in the world that week. Every world record below was set by the collision of all three — a genuinely scarce artefact, in freakishly good condition, sold at the exact peak of a speculative boom.
That boom ran from roughly 2020 to late 2021, when third-party grading, fractional-investment platforms and lockdown nostalgia poured serious money into sealed cartridges. The records it left behind are real, verified sales — but they are also snapshots of a moment that has since cooled. Read the catalogue with both halves of that sentence in mind.
Factory sealed · Wata 9.8 A+
$2,000,000
≈ £1.49m
2021 · Rally (private marketplace sale)
The standing world record. Bought through the collectibles platform Rally for a reported $140,000 in April 2020, then sold on to an anonymous buyer sixteen months later — a fourteen-fold return in under a year and a half.
Factory sealed · Wata 9.8 A++
$1,560,000
≈ £1.16m
July 2021 · Heritage Auctions
The first game ever to clear a million dollars at public auction — and, at the time of writing, still the auction record. Heritage called the 9.8 A++ grade effectively the highest feasible mark a Wata submission could hope for.
Factory sealed · Wata 9.0 A · early production
$870,000
≈ £650,000
July 2021 · Heritage Auctions
An early-production variant from the first months of the US release. It held the world record for the most expensive game ever auctioned — for exactly two days, until Lot 02 sold in the same Heritage event.
Factory sealed · early production
$660,000
≈ £490,000
April 2021 · Heritage Auctions
A second sealed copy of the same 1985 launch title, sold four months before Lot 01. Briefly the world record — the third time in twelve months the crown had changed hands.
Factory sealed · Wata 9.2 A+ · “Bros.” left first-print variant
$156,000
≈ £116,000
November 2020 · Heritage Auctions
The variant that made variants matter: on the earliest production run, the word “Bros.” sits to the left of the box art, covering one of Mario's gloves. Twenty bidders chased it to a then-world record, beating the $114,000 paid for a sealed Super Mario Bros. that July.
Factory sealed · Wata 9.6 · red-label early print
$144,000
≈ £107,000
2022 · Heritage Auctions
Reportedly the record for the game — a red-label copy from the early production run, boxed before Mario Kart 64 passed a million sales and moved to the cheaper Player's Choice reissue that most surviving copies wear.
Factory sealed · Wata 9.2 A+
$66,000
≈ £49,000
March 2020 · Heritage Auctions
The collector's grail from before the boom. Nintendo bought the rights to Bandai's running-mat game shortly after launch and rebranded it World Class Track Meet, pulling the original from shelves — collectors speculate only around 200 US copies survive in any condition. Sealed examples had already made $35,000–$42,000 on eBay in 2016–17.
A note on the boom. Those 2020–21 prices were set at the top of a market that has since cooled sharply. A US class action later alleged that grading and auction parties had helped inflate graded-game prices — allegations Wata and Heritage deny — and market watchers have reported that many graded games now trade well below their peak values. None of the million-dollar records has been approached since. The sales above are verified; treat them as history, not as a price guide.
Every lot above is an American NTSC cartridge, and that is not a coincidence. The grading houses, the auction records and the price guides were all built around the US market — which means the PAL story, our story, is chronically underdocumented. British and European rarities rarely make headlines, not because they aren't scarce, but because the machinery that turns scarcity into six-figure hammer prices barely looks at them. For a UK collector, that is arguably an opportunity: genuinely rare PAL items still trade for sensible money.
The honest reality check first: the games in your loft are almost certainly not these. The vault lots are sealed, graded, first-print American copies — a category so narrow that most collectors will never hold one. But the lessons that set those prices transfer directly to ordinary collecting. Condition is compounding: the difference between a battered cartridge and a clean boxed copy with its manual is routinely a multiple, not a percentage. Completeness is provenance: inserts, poster, even the polystyrene tray all tell a buyer the game lived a careful life. And variants reward attention — the £116,000 lesson of Lot 05 is that the earliest print run of a common game can be worth vastly more than the reprint sitting next to it, if you know what to look for.
If you want to put actual numbers on your own collection, start with our guide to how retro game values really work — sold prices, condition tiers, and the UK-specific quirks the American guides skip.
A factory-sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1985), graded Wata 9.8 A+, sold for $2 million in August 2021 through the collectibles marketplace Rally — roughly £1.49 million at July 2026 exchange rates. The public-auction record is a sealed Super Mario 64 that made $1.56 million at Heritage Auctions in July 2021. At the time of writing, no verified sale has beaten either figure.
Because almost nobody kept them sealed. Cartridges were toys — bought to be opened — so factory-sealed survivors from the 1980s are genuinely scarce, and the shrink-wrap itself becomes the artefact. Add condition grading, first-print variant hunting and a wave of investment money in 2020–21, and a pocket-money shop purchase from 1986 became a six-figure asset.
Wata Games is a US firm that grades collectible video games, scoring the box on a 10-point scale and the factory seal with a letter grade, then encasing the game in an acrylic slab. VGA (Video Game Authority) offers a similar service. Grading underpinned the record prices of 2020–21, but it has also drawn scrutiny — a US class action alleged that grading and auction parties helped inflate the market, allegations the firms deny.
Yes — and the PAL market is arguably undervalued. The grading houses, auction records and price guides are built around the American NTSC market, so genuinely scarce European releases — the Scandinavian-only Mr. Gimmick, the Starwing Competition cartridge, PAL exclusives such as Devil World — are underdocumented rather than unloved. Scarcity is regional: a game can be common in Ohio and nearly impossible to find boxed in Britain.
The graded-game boom of 2020–21 has clearly cooled. None of the million-dollar records has been approached since, and many graded games have reportedly changed hands for a fraction of their peak prices. Ordinary collecting — boxed PAL games at sensible money — was never really part of the bubble and has held up far better.
Use sold prices, never asking prices — check completed listings rather than what sellers hope for. Condition and completeness dominate value: the box, manual and inserts routinely multiply a bare cartridge's price. Our guide to retro game values covers the method step by step, and Retro Delights offers a £5 printable appraisal of any public member shelf if you would rather have the numbers done for you.
Retro Delights members catalogue their collections here and can share them publicly with live indicative values. Any visitor can order a £5 printable appraisal of a public shelf — a PDF with per-game and aggregate values, no account required. And when you're ready to buy or sell between collectors, the Trading Post is our members' notice board: real people, no fees.