Sealed Super Mario Bros Sells for $3M Setting New Record for a Video Game

In the coin collecting universe, which has had a world of third party grading for close to 50 years now, there's a saying "buy the coin, not the holder". But at the same time, there's also a sub-market of people explicitly buying the holder. People will pay a comical premium to hold the "finest ever graded" (or conversely, the "lowest ever graded") example of the same basic date-and-variety.

The difference is that the coin market evolved this ecosystem somewhat organically. The services originally started more towards "proving a rare date prone to counterfeiting is authentic" and "providing a neutral third-party since grading can be imprecise and subjective". People didn't start considering the holder for quite a while.

I think part of the ickniness is that this smells like it was designed to puff up the legitimacy of the grading service as much as anything. It's not like taking something that's understood as broadly rare-- some one-off prototype or widely known scarce item (like the World Championship cartridges). Instead, they're taking something very common and trying to focus on "peripheral" rarity factors-- a sub-variety (some particular early packaging) and a condition rarity (most units are no longer untouched and sealed). This has a smell of "you too could turn a fairly typical item into something life-changing by sending it in for professional certification!"

We get that stuff in the coin collecting world, but it usually doesn't make as much hay as you'd expect. People still get way more excited about the simple "1804 dollar" than the probably rarer "1817/4 half dollar, Overton 102 variety, top grade"