Rally, a platform that lets people buy fractional shares of collectibles, originally purchased this sealed Super Mario Bros. cartridge as an "investment asset" in April 2020 for $140,100 — already a record at the time.
By July 2021, with the retro-gaming market boiling over, Rally flipped it in a private sale brokered outside the auction houses.
The $2,000,000 sale broke the record set by Super Mario 64 just days earlier — a whiplash-fast game of leapfrog that turned retro cartridges into a genuine financial-media story.
Business outlets ran the math out loud: a fourteen-fold return on a video game cartridge, beating the stock market, real estate, and most crypto by a mile.
Ad space