If
you’re into retro gaming, you probably heard about the recent record-breaking sale
of the factory sealed Super Mario Bros. NES cartridge selling for more than
$100,000. It was given a 9.4 grade by Wata.
You
can watch a concise, informative video by Kelsey Lewin on exactly why that cartridge is
worth so much here:
Prior
to that record-breaking SMB sale, Heritage Auctions, a prestigious auction house, tested the waters on video games graded by Wata by
including several in their Jan. 13 Sunday Internet Comics, Animation, & Art Auction. I wrote about that Jan. auction for AntiqueWeek. You can read the full text of that article below.
Video Games Go Mainstream with Heritage Auction
By Brett Weiss
It
had to happen.
Retro
video game collecting has been mainstream for well over a decade, with prices for
desirable games skyrocketing exponentially, and Dallas-based Heritage Auctions,
one of the biggest auction houses in the world, is finally getting in on the
action.
“The
key to making it happen was Wata Games,” said Heritage Vice President Barry
Sandoval, referring to the video game grading service. “We toyed a little bit
with the idea of selling video games, but what sold us is that one of Wata’s
principals, Mark Haspel, used to be with CGC. That he was involved made us take
it seriously. CGC
has graded somewhere between three and five million comic books. That’s a good
model to follow.”
Heritage
dipped its toes in the vintage video game waters by offering 25 boxed games—some
of them factory sealed—at its Jan. 13 Sunday Internet Comics, Animation, &
Art Auction. More than 30 collectors bid on a factory sealed 9.4 B+ (Seal
Rating) copy of The Legend of Zelda
(1987), a groundbreaking action role-playing game for the Nintendo Entertainment
System. The NES, which debuted in the U.S. in 1985, revived the console
industry after the Great Video Game Crash of 1983. Zelda was the top video game lot in the auction.
“We
thought Zelda would sell for a few
hundred dollars,” Sandoval said. “It went for $3,360.”
To
get an idea of the value of specific games, Sandoval said Heritage “checks out
eBay and other websites,” but they “don’t put estimates on these types of
auctions.”
“It’s
up to the bidders to determine the worth,” he said.
Sandoval
said he is a “former collector” whose interest is in Atari, but he explained
that Atari is a “smaller niche” and that the Nintendo Entertainment System is the
go-to console for “big money.”
The
NES was indeed well represented at the auction, with high prices commanded for
such popular titles as:
·
Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles
(1989, 8.5 CIB), $312
·
Super Mario Bros. (1985, 8.0 CIB), $312
·
Wario's Woods (1994, 9.4 A+ Seal
Rating), $228
·
Mega Man 5 (1992, 6.0 CIB), $216
·
Super Mario Bros.
3
(1990, 6.5 CIB), $210.
Nearly
two dozen bidders competed for a factory sealed (8.5 A Seal Rating) copy of Excitebike, a motorcycle racing game
that was an NES launch title, meaning it debuted with the console in 1985. It
went for $1,140. The game was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, known best for
creating such iconic Nintendo titles like as Donkey Kong, Super Mario
Bros., and Starfox.
Another
top earner was Dragon Warrior (1989),
the first game in the long-running Dragon
Quest role-playing game series. Seventeen bidders drove the price of an 8.5
A (Seal Rating) example to $660. As a promotional tool, Nintendo of America had
offered the game free to new and renewing subscribers to the company’s Nintendo Power magazine.
The
highest price realized for a game released for a console other than the NES was
Double Dragon (1988) for the Sega
Master System, which was the closest thing the NES had to a serious competitor
during the late 1980s. A 9.6 CIB copy went for $204. The auction also included
some loose (cartridge only) Super Nintendo games. The Super Nintendo EntertainmentSystem (SNES), released in 1991, was the follow-up console to the NES.
Sandoval
sees correlations between video games and comics. A relatively modern type of
collectible (the first video game console was the original Magnavox Odyssey,
released in 1972), video games evoke comic books in several ways. Both are
colorful and cartoonish, both are meant to be used (as opposed to merely looked
at), and the fan demographic is similar.
However,
there’s one key difference in terms of collectability. Unlike the vast majority
of comic books released during the late ’80s and early ’90s, which are worth
practically nothing, a fairly high percentage of video games from this time are
quite valuable, especially complete in the box.
Sandoval
said that is because “comic books from that era were preserved in large numbers,”
thanks in large part to the speculator boom in which people were hoarding comic
books in hopes that they could one day sell them in order to send their kids to
college. Video games, on the other hand, were often thrown out or sold for
pennies on the dollar at garage sales and flea markets once the next big gaming
console would come along. And few people kept the boxes and manuals, a
consideration not relevant to comics.
Sandoval
said Wata will at present only grade games from the Nintendo NES and forward,
meaning they don’t deal with video games released for such relics as the Atari2600, Intellivision, and ColecoVision. Currently, they are primarily interested
in systems produced by Nintendo and Sega. Sandoval hopes this will change at
some point in order to “round things out.”
According
to Sandoval, Heritage’s strategy going into video game sales is to start off
slowly with internet auctions, get bidders used to the idea, and then come in
later with the more expensive stuff for their signature auctions with live
auctioneers and bidders.
“This
will give people results to look at to lend the idea more credibility,” he said.
Sandoval
called the Jan. 13 auction “just the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to video
game sales.
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