Unopened copy of Super Mario Bros. sells for a record $2M | Hacker News Reader

Unopened copy of Super Mario Bros. sells for a record $2M

theverge.com

43 pointspseudolus20 comments

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Yeah, this reads like a sketchy submarine PR article. It’d be more believable if it was auctioned by Christie’s

What I've heard is that this is essentially a front for money laundering, just like you see in fine art. Anyone have any evidence?

Here's how the theory goes

- I have $2M in dirty money

- I find some reasonably rare collectors item that's worth a lot but certainly not $2M (like unopened copy of SMB) and buy it

- I put it up for auction and give my $2M to a trusted associate

- Trusted associate bids $2M

- Wow! Wouldn't you know it? Someone's crazy enough to pay $2M for this!

- Trusted associated takes their cut and now my $2M is clean --- I got it from the sale of a rare copy of SMB at auction

Because after all, who can really say that a copy of SMB isn't really worth $2M? It's value is ultimately subjective like fine art is, and someone was willing to pay that price, haha collectors be crazy speculators and all that.

Is there anything to this theory?

I’m sure it happens, but transferring 2MM to the trusted associate’s account in a way that the art auctioneer would accept, without suspicion, would still be challenging. Selling hundreds of junk “collectibles” for cash at a retail location seems more reliable.

Cool. It does seem like an ostentatious obvious thing that would make it easy to get caught.

What do you think of the fine art world?

Wouldn't the associate be at risk at audit for having $2M unreported income and untaxed money?

Yeah, this story doesn’t seem to really explain much, because the person receiving the dirty money and returning it is literally just performing the act of money laundering. It’s not clear what about art auctions specifically makes this easier or less risky.

About a week ago a Patrick Mahomes card sold for a record $4.3 million. Not sure it's a money laundering scheme, but perhaps a way of promoting or pumping the price of similar collectibles.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.si.com/nfl/chiefs/.amp/news...

I think it goes more like this:

- I have $4M in dirty money

- I find some associate willing to exchange $2M in clean money for $4M in dirty money

- I find unopened SMB and buy it, put it for auction

- Trusted associate bids $2M, gets SMB and $4M.

Where did trusted associate get 2 million? (from you, but that's dirty money. Now your associate has a 2 million dirty money problem)

This is a small group of investors selling and making these ridiculous purchases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toN5NFr48T8&t=31s

Unlike the other games going for ridiculous prices, a mint boxed SMB is genuinely rare since nobody really had a need to purchase it and later retail variants came combined with Duck Hunt.

Something in hadn't considered was the sans duck hunt.. My fam got NES quite late in 89-90(at least) and indistinctly recall it being bundled with duck hunt. Not sure I have seen a standalone cart.

The Action Set was probably the most popular NES bundle and came with Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt. However there was a number of different bundles with different games or no game even. Nintendo sold SMB standalone until 1994 at least according to WATA's Black Box variants page. Some bundles even came with just SMB and no NES Zapper.

It's still an insanely common title.

I was a little jealous of people who had Duck Hunt with theirs since we had gotten ours earlier.

the legend of zelda also only sold for that sum, because it had a really good quality and it was in an early production run ( NES R and there is an earlier production run NES TM, but as people know only a single copy of that exists and the owner wont sell).

Yes a hanging tab black box SMB in good condition is very rare but 2 million is just absolutely ridiculous; and most likely fraudulent.

I remember when Nintendo World Championship carts were selling for $40,000+ a few years ago (before these WATA scammers got involved) and that was by far the most rare and valuable cart... Super Mario Bros is a game that sold 30+ Million copies in various NES cart forms. This reeks of fishy dishonest speculation.

When in comes to collectables, a rule of thumb is prices peak when the children who grew up with the collectable reaches their peak earning years (say 30 years after age 10). This applies to baseball cards, comic books, toys and video games.

But of course, like fine art collectors are incentivized to do standard price manipulation to inflate the price of their collections arbitrarily (which is also useful for money laundering). In other words restrict supply by buying up all existing collections for pennies, and also buying/selling the items to yourself at ever increasing prices.

I mean at some point someone bought a copy of Super Mario Bros. and held on to it until they were sure it's the last one available and sold it for $2m.

What would one buy today to do that? A Playstation? An iPad? It feels like a small complaint that the collectible industry will be struggling. I was just struck by the death of physical media all of a sudden.

It would presumably need to be something that is both wildly popular in its time but also toward the beginning of a huge cultural change. Any old copy of a Call of Duty game is wildly popular, but probably fairly late to become symbolic of the huge cultural change that was video games.

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