Bet you wish you'd saved the box...

Pictured: America.
Not pictured: Hillary's emails

In these uncertain times, it's good to-huh? Yeah, I'm sick of that phrase too. How about: in these times of unrelenting calamity needlessly and exponentially worsened by incompetent leadership, selfishness and willful ignorance. Right? Anyway, in these times, it's good to know that the ultra-rich are still finding socially conscious ways to use their immense wealth. Ways like spending one hundred and fourteen thousand dollars on a copy of Super Mario Bros. Yes. A hundred and fourteen thousand. Dollars. Of money.

Super Mario Bros. for those of you maybe born after the eighties or for those with lives, isn't the first game to feature Nintendo's mascot, but it was probably the most famous one. It's also one of the most ubiquitous.

So ubiquitous, it might just be easier to lay your hands on a hundred thousand copies
 of the game and then sell them for a dollar each. That's just good business sense.

Your childhood game collection
could be worth tens of dollars!

According to Nintendo, there are something like forty million copies of Super Mario Bros. out there in the world, not counting rereleases and digital downloads. There are probably at least two copies sitting in that box of junk you left at your parents house right now. Go ahead. Call them. I'll wait...what's that? Three copies? Thought so. Why someone would pay the list price of a decent house in most of the country (or two months rent in San Francisco-zing!) bears some explanation and even when I tell you, probably more explanation.

And here we all went and
worked jobs for all these years...

A loose copy, that is no box or manual, is like ten bucks on eBay, or just a dollar or two at a flea market or garage sale. You could tile your backsplash with them. This particular copy however, like the one that sold last year (for $100,150, no, you not losing your mind, this has happened before), is unopened. Meaning it was owned either by some child in 1986 with the uncanny foresight to stick this in a drawer and let it appreciate rather than open it up and play it or it was misplaced in a warehouse or something.

Which, whatever, never-been-opened NES games aren't that impossible to find and Super Mario Bros. new-in-box sells for about seven or eight thousand, which is still a preposterous sum for a game Nintendo just gives away with its online service, so what gives?

In some ways, you're just paying $113,999.00 for an acrylic case.

We can only hope that knowing this didn't
replace some other, more useful piece of
information, like how to tie your shoes.

Well, this copy-bace yourself-has a cardboard hangtag. That feeling you're having right now? That eye-rolling disdain for the insane logic of the collector mentality? That's perfectly normal. Who even cares about the little cardboard flap retailers used to stick these things on pegs in the 80's? Evidently some anonymous bidder, that's who. The fact that the hangtag is a part of the cardboard box, and not a plastic one stuck on the shrink wrap makes this copy of the game particularly rare and now you know that fact and can't un-know it.

Look, I get that one of the selling points of our economic system that's working so splendidly is that anyone, anyone, is allowed to amass (or inherit) as much money as they possibly can and then blow it on whatever they want, no matter how useless and no matter how many kids can't afford school lunches, but one hundred fourteen thousand dollars for a video game? I hope rich people remember this when we finally have our Bastille Day.

"But what did we ever do to-oh...right..."

-America's embarrassingly wealthy