19 ms·
Super Mario 64 game sells for record-breaking $1.5M at auction
- DizzyDoo 5y agoA short Twitter thread from Pat Contri on this is something I found provides helpful balance: https://twitter.com/PatTheNESpunk/status/1414300310659473408 https://twitter.com/PatTheNESpunk/status/1414300310659473408 "Wow, those Charizard cards from your childhood are now worth lots of $" has been a common, popular headline across media in the last year, and now it looks like old video games are next. And as Pat says, I think there's reason to suspect that, in this instance, this is artificial pricing.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoAs an 80s and 90s gaming enthusiast --and, to a small extent, collector-- I really want to know what the hell is going on here. It doesn't seem that long ago that Nintendo World Championship was going for $15k and I could at least understand that from the confluence of historical significance and rarity, but $1.5M for one of the most sold games in history just because of its condition!? Is this just a symptom of the ludicrous increases in wealth disparity, that someone has $1.5M to throw away on something like this? Or is it some kind of money laundering? Seriously, someone please explain this to me.
- rightbyte 5y agoProbably laundering right?
- ganoushoreilly 5y agoThe general thought is that like Higher end Art, it's a form of Laundering / Tax evasion that's now running rampant in the Console Gaming side of the house. It's rather sad, now a lot of classics are being ridiculously priced at used game stores and while i'm all for making money, some of the recents i've seen have been insane price gouges. I saw Panzer Dragoon for Saturn going for 3800 at a used game shop, it was not complete either. I bought a fully complete in box copy for like $380 a couple years back and That was pricey to me.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago$380 for complete and good condition does sound a bit pricey, but it's within the realm of "I have this and I'm willing to wait for a buyer who wants it badly enough". $3800 is insane. I myself own a couple rare-ish games (none sealed, I bought them to play them), and if they got up that high I'd sell them in a heartbeat. I have a satiator, I don't need a CIB Saturn Bomberman.
- ganoushoreilly 5y agoExactly, I like owning a few of my favorites. I do have a complete US Dreamcast collection and the vast majority are Sealed. I started snagging them up as soon as the console "failed". I hadn't even noticed the Satiator was out finally! Thanks for dropping the reminder. There goes $250 lol.
- orangegreen 5y agoHow does one launder money / evade taxes with high end art?
- lathiat 5y agoMy naive understanding is it’s a way of transferring money in return for something supposedly valuable. That might really be payment for something else.
- herbst 5y agoThen why would they do it so visibly when they could use quiet assets? IMO that doesnt make sense
- thebean11 5y ago1. Buy for $x 2. Get appraised for $100x 3. Donate 4. Take $100x tax deduction
- vincentmarle 5y ago
- wgerard 5y agoI read an interesting explanation on reddit somewhere that posited this is the result of a small group of devoted enthusiasts basically wash trading: They sell the games to each other back and forth for extremely high prices to make it seem like there's an insane amount of demand for them, in order to make that a self-fulling prophecy. Whether that's true or not I have no idea, but it's certainly plausible.
- adventured 5y agoThese game prices are no more absurd than a Mickey Mantle card being worth $20-$30 million (1952 Topps Mantle #311 PSA 9 sold for $5 million not long ago; there are three superior PSA 10 copies which in theory should be worth a lot more, two of which are owned by a billionaire). Consider the global scale and love of video games, Mario, Zelda, etc. Versus the localized scale of Major League Baseball (even if it's in the largest economy) and particularly Mickey Mantle. So why not Mario if Mantle? It makes just as much sense (however much sense that is, granted). Check out what new prospects go for in the baseball card world. A Wander Franco card went for $200,000. This is a 20 year old that has barely played any professional baseball, recently got called up with the Tampa Rays, and hasn't hit well so far (and may just end up as a flop, as these guys sometimes do). So Wander Franco cards make sense, and Mario doesn't? Obviously all of it seems crazy. And yet there it is. You know what else is really crazy? Tesla's valuation. Shopify's valuation. Snowflake's valuation. DocuSign's valuation. And so on. Yeah, I know, those are real companies that have products and services. Ok. I posit that many of those valuations are less sustainable than a 1952 Mickey Mantle card at $5m. And we're not talking a million dollars, we're talking trillions of dollars of laughably over-inflated valuations in the stock market. Mario at $1.5m is not crazier than Tesla at $600-$800 billion. It's all part of the same asset speculation mania. Millions of people out there are paying obscene prices for stocks and it won't end well. And with stocks it's not just some rich person with a toy hobby (because who really cares what that person burns their money on), it's retirement funds, pensions. All loaded up on Coca Cola at 33 times earnings, for a company that hasn't seen any growth in five years, has mediocre prospects for growth, and deserves half their present valuation at best (now repeat that scenario for most of the garbage-valuation blue chips, like McDonald's or Starbucks; check out the valuation on WD-40 (WDFC), an old slow-growth degreaser/lubricant spray company sporting a 40-45 PE; the entire market is like that now, out of its collective mind). These are the consequences of perpetually low interest rates, it has bred a rabid culture of speculation and desperation for any yield or return.
- Swizec 5y agoIt is very convenient, for many reasons, if you can call a $1.5m transfer “a sale”. If you can support said price with an auction so the price is supported by a fair market, even better. Legally transferring that much money to another person (and minimizing taxes) is difficult. Art and collectible sales are a convenient escape hatch.
- louhike 5y agoMost collectors of old games do not understand why it was sold that much. Super Mario 64 in mint condition and wrapped is rare, but clearly not often to justify this price. One thing I've noticed though if that people buying a auctions do not always seem aware of the actual prices on the market. I attended an auction recently and bought nothing, as all people in the community I know. Everything was sold for far too mych. We were laughing about it, wondering why people were buying those games at those prices, as we know we could easily get them for far less. I'd be really interested to know more about the dynamics making people spending far too much money like that (misinformation? excitation during the auction?).
- theklub 5y agoWho purchased it? I believe it's an advertisement for grading services/a way to grow the industry.
- haggy 5y ago> A high rating is not enough to guarantee a high auction price - although it helps. Another copy of Super Mario 64 in the same auction with a 9.6 A++ rating sold for a comparatively affordable $13,200 This seems to reinforce some kind of laundering/tax evasion scenario. There is little logical reason for one cartridge to go for $13K and another to go for $1.5mm when both are certified excellent condition. It appears that the one going for far more is a product of timing. Someone needed to move a large chunk of money quickly and decided on the Mario cartridge.
- cinntaile 5y agoIf the normal buyers are only willing to pay $13k I don't see how it makes sense to pay $1.5 million to launder money. That's a big loss you'll have to take.
- rightbyte 5y agoThe seller is a co-conspirator? The loss is only the auction house fee in that case.
- cinntaile 5y agoBut if you use dirty money to buy a good, it doesn't magically turn into clean money. A possible scenario could be where the buyer has clean money and wants to pay the seller for services by bidding way too much for a rare game. It doesn't make too much sense though because now your transaction is under scrutiny by the entire world?
- MiddleEndian 5y agoHiding in plain sight! The perfect plan!
- herbst 5y agoNot when you have bazillions of ways to do that without being in plain sight. NFTs seem to better fit this need, and even then I don't get why people always assume it has to do with black money
- jfkylymyn6 5y agoThere is no fundamental difference between a very rare old vase, car or game. Someone living in 1950 would also think is crazy to pay 1 million for a 1940 car. Someone living in ancient China would also think it's crazy to pay a lot of money for a cooking pot. People are realizing this, and are basically front-running the market, so the price of future priceless artifacts are rising much sooner.
- MathYouF 5y agoThis is the answer I fundamentally agree with on this subject. Super Mario 64 for N64 is a part of humanity's cultural and history, and the supply of similar items will only decrease over time. The expected value is possible for several lifetimes from now though, and most rich families struggle to hold onto it forever.
- krapp 5y agoI agree the software is part of humanity's cultural history but the physical artifact of the cartridge is nearly worthless. We could literally mass produce Mario 64 cartridges to exact specifications if we wanted to. You can buy reproduction carts on the internet, cheap. We can't recreate ancient works of art or antique machinery, those are truly unique, easily but Nintendo cartridges are just chips and plastic.
- perl4ever 5y ago>someone has $1.5M to throw away on something like this Your reaction seems pretty normal and all, but your ethical viewpoint seems backwards to me. If they spent $1.5M on something that involved the amount of labor and resources that normally buys, then they threw it away, if it wasn't for the general good. A yacht for instance. But if they spent $1.5M on a collectible with no real use, then they have just exchanged a coupon, basically, for another coupon. They made a decision not to take useful resources away from society that they had a coupon for.
- efficax 5y agoMoney laundering is definitely involved in the fine art market but the explanation here is more banal. It's the same thing driving absurd NFT prices: Quantitative Easing policies by the fed have dumped a shitton of money into the equities markets and some people have cash to burn and nowhere to put it. The nasdaq is up almost 200% in 5 years. What do you do with all this extra cash? There's only so much you can spend on luxuries for yourself. For the rest, why not put some into speculative assets which give the small chance of very high returns (crypto, startups, and, apparently, N64 carts).
- Keyframe 5y agoMoney laundering, no other explanation.
- Crash0v3rid3 5y agoThere certainly seems to be something nefarious happening here but how are they laundering money this way?
- dehrmann 5y agoYeah, I'm not sold it being money laundering. Getting a story by the BBC is the absolute last thing you would want. You also want to avoid expensive items with paper trails. High-volume cash businesses is where it's at.
- jfoutz 5y agoI don't think this is what's happening, but I think this is the model. I have a super Mario cartridge. I also have a lot of drugs (or whatever) that I'd like to sell, but I don't have a distribution network, so I have to sell at a wholesale price. I put up the proxy object for auction. You bid far more than we think anyone would pay for the proxy object, and you win. We've made separate arrangements for the drugs (or whatever) so you already have them, or will get them soon. Now I have a pocket full of legitimate cash. I think there's some biases stuck in American minds about Al Capone. He was a bad guy that did lots of illegal things. But his downfall was tax evasion. This approach gives me a reasonable explanation for all that money, and I can pay taxes on it, so I _appear_ to be an upstanding member of society.
- casefields 5y agoThe one problem with this theory is why not launder $1.5 million through a boring painting by a C-list painter, rather than a headline grabbing newsworthy object? It seems like unnecessary risk that'll attract IRS attention.
- ipaddr 5y agoIt feels more like a marketing move.
- sysadm1n 5y agoIsn't there, like hundreds of these floating around on eBay? I haven't searched eBay for them, but I would like to think that common and well circulated games are not that special or rare. It reminds me of the Comic Book Guy in the Simpsons saying: 'You opened it...it's no longer a collectible'
- libertine 5y agoThere's too much "odd" money going around these days, to the point that's bursting through the pipes.
- sodafountan 5y agoIt's not odd, we're coming off of a global pandemic where people were commuting less, saving more (no daycare, not eating out), and collecting stimulus checks. Meanwhile, the businesses that should have failed because of the drop in consumer spending were kept alive with PPP loans. At the same time, companies like Tesla and Micro-strategy are pouring billions into a new finite asset class. There's simply more cash flowing into the system, it's just run of the mill inflation.
- joosters 5y agoWhat I find really disheartening is that these games are attracting such huge valuations simply because of the condition of their boxes! They aren't rare editions, or exclusive, pre-release code. The money has nothing to do with the game itself. These bidders aren't game collectors, they are cardboard box collectors, nothing more.
- organsnyder 5y agoAre those true "game collectors" playing the games they purchase? If not, then what's the difference?
- joosters 5y agoIt's a fair point, the whole concept of buying something in a sealed container, and never opening it because that would ruin the value, is a bit bonkers. Mind you, the same could be said of wine collectors - just how much 'fine wine' gets bought at auctions for it never to be opened? At least with the wine collectors, they don't think a bottle is worth 10x the going price simply because the label on it is slightly cleaner than another.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoNot to Scotsman the whole thing, but I would say that yes, in my experience game collectors play their games. Maybe not all of them if their desire is to own a complete set or something, but generally speaking.
- dehrmann 5y agoBoxes play into it, but a rare, desirable edition with a bad box will probably be worth more than a common edition with a good box. The box is just one more dimension to grade the games on because collectors are always looking for something more pristine, and cartridges will generally be in good shape. I still think it's silly--I just get the "box" motivation.
- chrisgd 5y agoWhy was the 96 rated one worth 100x less?
- markus_zhang 5y agoWhen more of these kinds of news hit the public forums like HN, maybe it's time to sell...but just my humble opinion and I don't know how to quantify these things.
- dehrmann 5y agoThis was on Pawn Stars in 2019, so... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KS9kRUCEVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KS9kRUCEVA
- effingwewt 5y agoJust a heads-up Pawn Stars is super fake. The 'customers', the 'store', the 'experts',the prices paid and items sold/bought are fakes sometimes (known and unknown). Tons of articles all over about them over the years. Disclaimer- I still watch it from time to time, it's a guilty pleasure.
- dehrmann 5y agoThis is somewhat depressing because of how unusable it is. With baseball cards, you all you could ever do was look at them, so you lose nothing when they're encapsulated. With videogames, it's sealed (at least this one), and unplayable. You're not even sure if the cartridge works.
- jonny_eh 5y agoIt's not like it's a rare game. You could buy a loose cart for $10 and play that. I can guarantee you that whoever bought this has one already to play.