A Super Mario Bros. 3 prototype NES cartridge sold at auction last week for the hefty sum of $31,200. The rare copy in question housed unique pre-release data for the game and sparked a two-day bidding war which resulted in the high final price. The critically acclaimed game released 30 years ago, in February 1990, in North America and copies in good condition can be highly prized by video game collectors.
Though $31,200 may seem like large price to pay for a several-decades old video game, it is not the highest price a Super Mario Bros. 3 cartridge has gone for at auction. However, this rare prototype is valuable for what it says about the game’s development history, something which Nintendo known for being notoriously tight-lipped about. This secrecy is why the unprecedented Nintendo leaks, dubbed the Nintendo Gigaleak, that hit back in July caused such a stir. The information posted gave the gaming audience access to insights into Nintendo's process and revealed many previously unknown details like the fact that Luigi could have been in Super Mario 64.
As Lords of Gaming reports, the auction was hosted by Heritage Auctions, a Dallas-based auction house, and centered on a unique piece of gaming ephemera: a cartridge containing a pre-release version of Super Mario Bros. 3 inside a shell of what was originally a Kid Icarus game. The dramatically modified NES cartridge used to host the game software has three areas cut away to reveal the Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory, where the early data was stored. "Super 3" is handwritten in blue ink on top of the previous game’s label and the date is marked as February 1990, the same month Super Mario Bros. 3 released in North America. All this points to a rare instance of a hurriedly produced Nintendo prototype making its way to the public. The cartridge’s condition and authenticity were confirmed by video game certifier Wata Games, and it was the first prototype developed by Nintendo that the auction house had ever listed.
In addition to having one of the franchise’s early games valued so high at auction, Nintendo is also celebrating gaming’s most famous plumber turning 35 this year. Though that number is not entirely correct, as Mario appeared in Donkey Kong several years before his own game series debuted, the gaming giant announced a series of Mario-related game releases to commemorate the anniversary, which fans can get their hands on for a limited time.
The Mario franchise is hugely important to the gaming world, and so it makes sense that Super Mario Bros. 3 would fetch so much at auction. That is especially true of this particular copy, which is stuffed full - literally and figuratively - of Nintendo development history, which fans of the developer do not usually get to see. With this bidding war and the release of some of the 3D Mario classics just around the corner, Mario is in the spotlight once again.
Source: Lords of Gaming
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