So it's come to this, eh capitalism?

Do...do I even have to say it? Fiiiine. Two million dollars? Of money? For a video game? Something something, rich people are the worst. 

"Here's to an economic system that allows a select few to live
in abject luxury while everyone else struggles to buy insulin!
May it never come crashing down around us!"

-The rich

"Hurray for business! Are we rich now?"

-Shareholders

And I stand by that, although this exercise in everything wrong with capitalism is slightly different. Instead of some rando kajillionaire at an auction buying a factory sealed NES game that was sitting in someone's closet since 1986 or whatever, this sale involved shareholders. For some reason. Sure, there is still a one percenter with money to burn in play here, but instead of Heritage Auctions, this copy of the original Super Mario Bros. was sold by a company called Rally and Rally is website that buys and sells "equity shares in collectible assets."

And to answer your next question, yes, 
these idiots could have saved themselves a
lot of time if they'd just downloaded the app.

Yeah, I died a little inside when I read that too. This new way to get rich without making the slightest improvement to the world in which you live works by offering investors the opportunity to buy shares of some collectable, say a baseball card, or a copy of the Declaration of Independence (no, really) or, oh, I don't know, the one NES game literally every kid in America owned, and then those investors act like a board in a corporation, making decisions about when and for how much to sell. You can even do all this from your phone via an app. Because the future.

Or it might burst when everyone catches
on to the fact that it's just Mario 1.

I guess it's a way to reduce risk and maybe this puts the collectable tchotchke market within reach of the average person. So in a way it democratizes it. But in another way, it rewards hoarding behavior. Regardless, at two million dollars, this is now the record holder for the most anyone has paid for a single video game, at least for now. Sure, this bubble could burst at any moment when everyone catches on to the fact that every three weeks there's another incredibly rare sealed, WATA rated, once-in-a-lifetime copy of one game of another, but if it hasn't happened by now, who can say when it will be?

But there's something incredibly depressing to me about what this represents. Instead of producing things, this is an economy based on speculation about how much some idle rich person might be willing to spend to buy back a piece of their childhood. Like, that can't be sustainable, can it? I don't know, maybe I'm just kicking myself for not buying an extra copy when I was a child and putting it away for my retirement.

Of course, who could have predicted that this is what capitalism would be now?