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Pawn Stars: SUPER RARE Super Mario is SUPER EXPENSIVE (Season 17) | History

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A million-dollar Mario cartridge walks into the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, and Rick Harrison isn’t buying the hype.

In this clip from Pawn Stars Season 17’s “Pawn vs Ferrari” episode, a seller shows up at Rick Harrison and Chumlee’s Las Vegas shop with something most collectors only see in auction catalogs: a factory-sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. The cartridge isn’t just old and unopened — it’s been professionally graded, and the seller wants seven figures for it. What follows is a negotiation that never gets off the ground.

• The seller brings a sealed, early-run copy of Super Mario Bros. for the NES, graded by Wata Games at a 9.4 with an A+ seal rating.
• He opens negotiations by asking for $1 million, citing the cartridge’s scarcity and its place among the earliest test-market editions of the game.
• Rick and Chumlee acknowledge the game’s historical significance but Rick balks at the seven-figure price, and no deal is reached — the seller walks out with the cartridge still in hand.

The Cartridge on the Counter

What makes this particular copy of Super Mario Bros. stand out isn’t just that it’s sealed — plenty of games survive shrink-wrapped in someone’s closet. It’s the grade. Wata Games, the outfit that’s become the industry standard for authenticating and grading sealed video games, gave this cartridge a 9.4 with an A+ seal rating, putting it near the top of the scale for condition and packaging integrity. The seller frames it as an early-run piece from the game’s initial test-market distribution, the kind of production detail that serious NES collectors chase specifically because so few of those early boxes survived the decade unopened.

The Million-Dollar Ask

The seller doesn’t hedge. He puts a $1 million price tag on the table and leans on the cartridge’s rarity and its historic standing as one of the earliest surviving sealed copies. It’s a number that would have sounded absurd for a video game a decade earlier, but the sealed-game market had already started producing eye-popping results by the time this episode aired, which is exactly the argument the seller is making to Rick and Chumlee.

Rick balks at the seven-figure evaluation, emphasizing the speculative nature of such astronomical valuations and the difficulty of reselling the collectible at that price point.

Rick’s Decision to Pass

Rick and Chumlee don’t dispute the game’s importance — Super Mario Bros. is the title that put Nintendo on the map in North America, and everyone in the shop knows it. But Rick’s business is buying low enough to flip for a profit, and a $1 million asking price leaves him almost no room to move. His concern isn’t whether the cartridge is special; it’s whether there’s a buyer out there willing to pay anywhere near seven figures, and whether he could find that buyer before the money’s tied up indefinitely. That math doesn’t work for him, so the seller keeps his cartridge and leaves the shop without a deal.

For anyone tracking how far this hobby has come, it’s worth revisiting just how far Nintendo’s flagship franchise has traveled since that 1985 launch — a history that’s produced no shortage of oddball chapters, from courtroom battles over knockoff cartridges to fan projects that reimagine the plumber’s world entirely, like this Unreal-engine take on Super Mario Bros. The console wars that Nintendo helped kick off are their own story too, one that’s charted in detail across best-selling console history from 1972 to 2019.

The seller walked out of Gold & Silver still holding a cartridge worth a small fortune to the right buyer — he just didn’t find that buyer on camera. Whether he eventually got closer to his number at auction is a different story for a different day; on this episode, the Mario game went right back in his bag.