#Original ‘Super Mario Bros.’ video game sold for record $660K

Shigeru Miyamoto, a Japanese video game designer, producer and game director at Nintendo, speaks during the opening ceremony of “Super Nintendo World” on March 18, 2021.
AP

There may be a fortune hiding in that dusty box of old video game cartridges.

An original 1985 edition of “Super Mario Bros.” for the Nintendo Entertainment System sold for a whopping $660,000 in Dallas Friday, smashing the world record for a single video game sale, according to Heritage Auctions, which handled the transaction.

The unopened Nintendo video game is “the finest copy known to have been professionally graded for auction,” the company said in a statement. The previous record video game sale was a paltry $114,000, set last July.

The record-setting cartridge was purchased as a Christmas gift in 1986 then placed in a drawer and forgotten for 35 years, before it was found earlier this year.

The names of the seller and the buyer were not released.

“[The video game] stayed in the bottom of my office desk this whole time since the day I bought it,” the seller said in the Heritage Auctions release. “I never thought anything about it.”