No matter what medium you choose, there will always be collectors willing to pay top prices for the hobby’s rarest and most prestigious objects. Whether it is a rare and expensive Pokémon card or a ridiculously expensive collector’s editionsome people dig deep into their pockets to get some things.
Video games are no different, and mint versions of old games are often sold at auction for ridiculous prices. These are the rarest and most expensive video games of all time.
Our lowest entry on the list and it’s already in the six-figure range. Video game collecting is serious business.
Most of the games on this list are from the NES, and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out is definitely one of the most famous games from that era. The gaming community has tried pretty much everything you can do with it, including playing through the entire game blindfolded and beating the game as fast as a human will ever manage. The result is that a copy of this game recently sold at auction for $312,000.
An important distinction must be made here, as this is not the version of Super Mario Bros 2 that most Americans will be familiar with. Japan got a different version of SMB 2 for the NES, which was later released in America as Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels, as the developers at the time thought it would be too difficult for Americans, which is objectively funny.
Nevertheless, this makes original copies of this game even rarer than most others: a 1988 version of the game in mint condition sells for $324,000.
It should come as no surprise that the classic Mario games dominate this list. These classic titles have been on the shelf the longest, long enough that most people’s original copies have been battered, making the mint copies all the more rare. Super Mario World is considered one of the best 2D Mario titles, so naturally it’s highly sought after, so much so that someone was willing to pay $360,000 for an original copy.
You read that right. What some long believed to be a gaming myth has proven true in 2020. The story goes that when Sony first wanted to enter the video game console market, it wanted to do so in collaboration with Nintendo and develop the very first Nintendo PlayStation. Sony even went so far as to publicly announce the deal, but Nintendo went behind Sony’s back and signed another contract to manufacture the console the next day, forcing Sony to go it alone and changing the history of console gaming forever.
Things had progressed to the point where some prototype consoles were manufactured and promotional photos taken. The existence of these prototypes was in question for a long time, until someone showed up with one in 2020. The seller came across the console by chance while buying up a bunch of boxes of old tech in the ’90s when his former employer went bankrupt. Three decades later, this little prototype – which still works and plays both SNES cartridges and audio CDs – was auctioned for $360,000.
Let’s leave Nintendo aside for a minute and instead talk about the only Sega game of that era that was ever able to pull in such numbers. Sonic’s story is much rougher than Mario’s, but the original trilogy of 2D platformers is still popular with most gamers. That gives the original Sonic the Hedgehog the spot as the rarest and most expensive Sega game of all time, selling for $420,000.
The Madden Football series is a type of game that will simply never die. Sports games can get away with a lot that most other series can’t, because there will always be millions of football fans looking for their video game fix. This makes the very first game in the series extremely valuable, and the most recent example in mint condition sold for just under half a million dollars.
I hope you enjoyed this detour because from now on it’s all about Nintendo and it should come as no surprise that the Zelda series appears on this list. Depending on who you ask, this game can lay claim to being the first open world game and it was the start of an all-time great series that would redefine the genre again several decades later with titles like Breath of the Wild. All of this legacy leads to the original title selling for $870,000.
Tetris eventually reached seven-figure sales and held the record as the best-selling video game of all time until Minecraft finally came along and knocked it off the throne. Of course, some high-quality old copies have appeared in that time, but this edition, which sold for $1 million, is a little more than just a well-preserved cartridge.
This copy of the Sega Mega Drive version of Tetris is signed by Alexey Pajitnov, the original creator of this iconic game. Since this game was sold in 2011, no other copies of the game have surfaced in this condition with this signature, making it a truly unique item. For this reason, if it ever goes on sale again, it would certainly surpass the $1 million price tag.
Super Mario 64 is arguably one of the most important games of all time. Regardless of what you think of it by modern standards, it was one of the first fully 3D games that really showed a wide audience that the format could work, and the technology was ready to be adopted by the industry worldwide. This groundbreaking reputation has earned it a place in the upper echelons, selling for $1.5 million whenever a copy turns up in mint condition.
There was no question what would top this list. If you ask people to name classic video games, chances are the first thing that pops into their mouths is either Super Mario Bros or Tetris, even if they’ve never played a video game in their life. This recognition holds a lot of meaning, and it’s what causes people to freak out when a copy of the original release in mint condition shows up at auction. One such unopened copy sold for a staggering $2 million in 2021. It’s a cliche, but we mean it when we say it’s always worth checking the attic to see what you can find.
