So there's this wild corner of the collectibles market that absolutely exploded around 2020-2021 that most people still don't really know about. Video games became the costliest game in the world to collect, and I'm not even exaggerating with the numbers here.

The pandemic basically created this perfect storm for nostalgia-driven collecting. While everyone was stuck at home, people started hunting down sealed copies of games from their childhood, and the prices went absolutely insane. We're talking about a 20x increase in value within a single year for the right cartridges.

Let me break down some of the records that got set. In July 2020, a sealed Super Mario Bros. cartridge hit $114,000 at auction. That was wild enough at the time, but it was just the beginning. Fast forward to 2021 and things escalated dramatically. The Legend of Zelda fetched $870,000 in early July that year. Then Super Mario 64 came in at $1.56 million just a month later - that was the first video game ever to break seven figures.

But here's where it gets absolutely bonkers. By August 2021, someone anonymously paid $2 million for a sealed copy of the original Super Mario Bros. That's the costliest game in the world record that's been set so far. The cartridge was in original packaging, which is incredibly rare. What's interesting is that one transaction alone shows how the market had matured - it was handled through Rally, a platform that lets investors buy shares of collectibles.

The common thread? Nearly all these record-breakers involve Mario and his friends from the NES era. These aren't beat-up cartridges either - we're talking pristine, sealed copies that have been sitting in desk drawers for decades. One Super Mario Bros. copy literally spent 35 years forgotten before someone realized what they had.

The whole thing is pretty fascinating from a market perspective. You've got Gen X nostalgia colliding with actual investment potential, and the collectibles market is treating these games the same way they treat rare baseball cards or classic cars now. If you've got an old sealed game cartridge lying around, might be worth checking what it's worth these days.