Thirty thousand dollars. Of Money.

Who are these people, where do they get all this money and can I have some? Yup, in another example of everything wrong with the hyper-capitalist hellscape in which we live, someone just paid what the average American earns in a year for an old video game.

Seriously though, how do the one-percenters think this ends? I'm asking.

Although if you're going to gut a
cartridge, Kid Icarus is a good choice.

They say that something has value only if someone is willing to pay for it and in this case, pay someone did. Last week, Heritage Auctions, whose whole thing is selling objectively valueless objects to collectors who value them, auctioned off a prototype copy of Super Mario Bros. 3. It's one of the most ubiquitous NES games ever, but this isn't really about the game, it's about the rarity of the-huh? Yeah, you're looking at the broken piece of jank in the plastic WATA case over there, aren't you? That's it. The prototype was built out of a repurposed Kid Icarus cartridge somebody apparently laid into with a Dremel and then wrote on with a marker, but it was for internal use only, so I guess they didn't care what it looked like. I mean, it's not like they saw someone paying thirty grand for it someday.

You can however judge me for taking
a photo of the ending to post online
to prove that I finished it.

You heard me, thirty thousand dollars. Of money. For that. And don't get me wrong. I'm a grown-ass adultwho still plays the same video games he played when he was ten. In fact, I've played through Mario 3 recently. Don't judge me. My point is I get it. What I don't get is why someone paid thirty thousand dollars for it. And I'm not just talking about how it's a grotesque extravagance at a time when people are being crushed by student debt and have to do gofundme's to pay for surgery. What I'm asking is why someone paid all that money for that specific prototype. My issue is one of snobbery. 

The key difference being that
your copy didn't sell for 30K.

Look, I will never have thirty thousand dollars to blow on a video game. Or surgery. That said, it kind of feels like this person got taken. Sure, this is a prototype, but it's a prototype of the US release of the game. I'm not like an expert or anything, but SMB3 came out in Japan in 1988, while the exposed chips on this one are all labeled 1990. The game came out here in February of 1990, so this was presumably put together just before that release, meaning that it's probably identical or almost identical to the version sitting in a box in your attic or wherever. 

I know, neeeerrrrd. But I'm just pointing out that it's not like this cartridge would contain anything we've never seen before or have a bunch of cut content or anything. The value here is that it was handled by underpaid and overworked Nintendo of America staff back in 1990 who probably play tested it and gave it the green light or whatever they do and-ok, that is a little cool. But still, not cost of private four-year college's tuition cool. 

I don't now what you do for a living, but I'm willing to bet that neither
you nor I could clear out our desks and come up with something collectors
would pay tens of thousands of dollars for. Unlike mullet boy here.