When Video Games Became Investments: The Sealed Game Speculation Bubble

There is something inherently strange about taking a video game, putting it inside a thick plastic case where nobody can ever play it, assigning it a number, and then watching people trade it for the price of a house.

Yet for a few years, that became a very real part of retro gaming.

The sealed and graded video game market absolutely existed before the speculation bubble. Collectors have always cared about condition, and unopened games have always commanded a premium. There is nothing particularly unusual about someone wanting a beautiful complete-in-box copy of The Legend of Zelda or an untouched copy of a favorite childhood game.

What happened around 2019 through 2022 was something different.

Video games increasingly stopped being treated primarily as collectibles and started being presented as financial assets.

Companies graded them. Auction houses promoted record sales. Investment platforms divided individual games into shares. Headlines screamed about Mario cartridges selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. People who had never cared about collecting video games suddenly became interested because they thought prices were going up.

In my view, this produced a largely manufactured speculative bubble that was bad for the hobby. It took games that collectors might actually want to own and transformed them into investment vehicles for people whose primary interest wasn’t gaming history, preservation, or nostalgia.

It was simply making money.

Grading Wasn’t New, but Something Changed

Video game grading actually predates the bubble. Video Game Authority had already been grading games long before Wata Games appeared.

What Wata helped change was the way graded games were marketed.

When Wata introduced itself to collectors in 2018, its advisory board included people from established collectible industries, including comic and coin grading. One particularly notable adviser was Jim Halperin, co-founder of Heritage Auctions. Wata’s introduction explicitly discussed bringing ideas from established certification markets into video games.

That matters because comics, coins and trading cards already had something video games had never developed to the same degree: an infrastructure for turning collectibles into assets.

Instead of saying:

“This is a really nice copy of Super Mario Bros.”

you could say:

“This is a Wata 9.4 with an A++ seal.”

Numbers make things look standardized.

A buyer doesn’t necessarily need twenty years of experience examining NES boxes. A grading company has already told them which copy is supposedly better.

A 9.8 sounds better than a 9.6.

A 9.6 sounds better than a 9.4.

Suddenly an outsider with enough money can participate in the market without knowing much about video games at all.

That is incredibly useful if your goal is expanding the hobby.

It is also incredibly useful if your goal is speculation.

The $100,000 Mario

One of the major turning points came in February 2019.

An extremely early sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. sold privately for $100,150.

To be fair, this wasn’t an ordinary copy of Mario. It was an extremely early test-market version in remarkable condition. Even Wata’s president at the time distinguished it from later printings that were worth dramatically less. There was legitimate historical significance behind the game.

But the transaction also contained something that would become controversial later.

One of the three buyers was Jim Halperin of Heritage Auctions, who was also serving on Wata’s advisory board. Ars Technica reported that relationship at the time. Wata said Halperin had no involvement in grading the game.

That doesn’t prove anything illegal happened.

But I think it illustrates how small and interconnected this emerging market was.

The grader, the auction world, prominent collectors and people promoting video games as serious collectibles were not completely separate groups operating in isolation.

And then came the headlines.

A VIDEO GAME JUST SOLD FOR $100,000.

Suddenly everybody wanted to know what was sitting in their closet.

Then the Numbers Went Completely Insane

The record didn’t stay at $100,000 for long.

In July 2020, Heritage sold another sealed Super Mario Bros. for $114,000.

By April 2021, another copy sold for $660,000.

Then in July 2021 an early sealed copy of The Legend of Zelda sold for $870,000.

That record lasted approximately two days.

On July 11, 2021, Heritage sold a Wata 9.8 A++ copy of Super Mario 64 for:

$1,560,000.

Yes. More than one and a half million dollars for Super Mario 64.

This is where the market really starts looking detached from traditional video game collecting.

Super Mario 64 is not a rare game.

It was the best-selling Nintendo 64 title and sold nearly 12 million copies. What was scarce was that particular combination of being factory sealed and receiving an extremely high grade.

That distinction is important.

The market wasn’t really saying:

“Super Mario 64 is rare.”

It was saying:

“Super Mario 64, unopened, in this condition, with this grade, is rare.”

Those are very different things.

Creating Scarcity Through Categories

This is where grading becomes fascinating.

Imagine ten thousand surviving copies of a game.

First divide them into loose and boxed copies.

Then complete and incomplete.

Then opened and sealed.

Then early printing and later printing.

Then packaging variants.

Then 9.0, 9.2, 9.4, 9.6 and 9.8.

Then divide those again by seal grades.

You can take something that exists in huge numbers and gradually create categories containing only a handful of examples.

That scarcity isn’t necessarily fake.

A nearly flawless unopened copy really is rarer than a beat-up loose cartridge.

But there is a dangerous difference between physical scarcity and grading-population scarcity.

Suppose only three copies have received a 9.8.

That does not necessarily mean only three qualifying copies exist.

It might simply mean only three have been submitted so far.

Maybe fifty more are sitting in closets.

Maybe somebody finds an unopened shipping case tomorrow.

For older collectibles with decades of grading history, population statistics can become reasonably mature. Video game grading was still relatively young when enormous amounts of money started pouring into it.

Investors were sometimes pricing rarity before anyone really knew how rare some of these things were.

Video Games Became an “Asset Class”

Perhaps nothing summarizes the period better than what happened when Collectors Universe purchased Wata in July 2021.

The acquisition announcement didn’t simply discuss preserving gaming history.

It described video games as potentially becoming the next booming “alternative asset class.”

There it is.

Not games.

Not memories.

Not pieces of interactive history.

Assets.

And that is where I personally think this market went off the rails.

There’s nothing wrong with someone owning a sealed game because they love it. There’s nothing wrong with displaying one. There’s nothing wrong with paying extra for a pristine example.

But once the primary conversation becomes expected returns, appreciation and investment potential, something has fundamentally changed.

The person buying the game doesn’t necessarily want the game.

They want what they believe the next person will pay for it.

Mario Literally Became Stock

At the peak of the mania, the metaphor stopped being metaphorical.

Fractional investment companies began offering shares in individual collectibles.

Instead of buying a rare video game, investors could buy a tiny percentage of one.

Rally, for example, offered fractional ownership in graded video games. A Wata 9.6 A++ copy of Pokémon Yellow was offered at a valuation of $55,000, divided into 11,000 shares at $5 each.

At that point we’re miles away from someone finding a cherished childhood game at a flea market.

We’ve built a miniature stock market around Pikachu.

And when the speculative market weakened, these financialized games demonstrated exactly why collectibles make risky investments.

That same Rally Pokémon Yellow has displayed a last-traded value of $1.90 per share, corresponding to about $20,900 instead of its original $55,000 offering valuation.

Someone who put $1,000 into those $5 shares would see those shares represented by about $380 at that later trading price.

The game didn’t suddenly become less fun.

Pikachu didn’t disappear from the cartridge.

What disappeared was people’s willingness to pay increasingly ridiculous amounts for ownership.

When the Music Stopped

The collapse becomes even clearer when looking at comparable auction results.

In April 2021, a Wata 9.8 A+ sealed copy of Pokémon Sapphire sold through Heritage for $50,400.

In November 2022, another Pokémon Sapphire with the same 9.8 A+ grade sold for $9,600.

Different physical copy, same game, same grade.

That is roughly an 81 percent decline in comparable auction value.

A Wata 9.8 A++ Pokémon Emerald sold for $72,000 in July 2021.

Another copy with the same grade sold for $14,400 in January 2023.

That’s an 80 percent drop.

Not every person who bought at the peak actually sold afterward, so we can’t simply claim all of them realized massive losses.

Many didn’t.

And that’s another important feature of collectible bubbles.

When somebody buys a game for $50,000 and discovers buyers are now offering $10,000, they may simply refuse to sell.

On paper, they still own their “$50,000 game.”

In reality, the market has moved on.

The People Who Actually Wanted the Games Paid the Price Too

This is the part that bothers me most.

Speculative bubbles don’t exist in some separate universe from ordinary collectors.

They affect everybody.

When headlines tell people that old Nintendo games are worth fortunes, sellers raise prices.

Collectors start hoarding.

People buy games they don’t even want because they think they’ll appreciate.

Copies disappear into acrylic slabs, investment portfolios and vaults.

Suddenly somebody who actually loves a particular game has to compete financially with somebody who has never played it and has no intention of doing so.

That’s especially strange for video games because games are interactive objects.

They’re supposed to be played.

A sealed game worth thousands of dollars can never fulfill its original purpose without destroying much of the thing producing its financial value.

Open the package and you may lose thousands.

Keep it sealed and the game inside becomes almost irrelevant.

The cartridge might as well be a brick.

The investor isn’t buying Super Mario Bros. to play Super Mario Bros.

They’re buying an unopened cardboard box carrying the expectation that someone else will someday pay even more money for it.

Was the Bubble Actually Manipulated?

This is where some restraint is necessary.

Wata and Heritage became the subjects of serious criticism and allegations that conflicts of interest and promotional activity helped inflate the market. Collectors later filed litigation against Wata and related defendants.

Those accusations attracted enormous attention, particularly after investigations by gaming journalist Karl Jobst.

But allegations are not the same thing as proven facts.

The federal case ultimately ended on March 31, 2026, when it was dismissed without prejudice after the plaintiffs failed to respond to a court order. There was no final trial judgment establishing that Wata and Heritage had secretly conspired to manipulate video game prices.

So when I call this a manufactured bubble, I don’t mean that somebody necessarily sat in a smoke-filled room and decided what tomorrow’s Mario price would be.

I mean the market itself was manufactured.

Grading companies created standardized categories.

Auction houses created prestigious marketplaces.

Record prices generated publicity.

Publicity attracted investors.

Investors generated higher prices.

Higher prices encouraged more grading.

Investment companies turned games into fractional assets.

Every piece fed the next piece.

That’s how you manufacture a speculative market without needing every transaction to be fraudulent.

The Bubble Popped, but Grading Didn’t

The million-dollar frenzy eventually cooled.

That doesn’t mean graded video games disappeared.

Far from it.

There are still collectors willing to pay serious money for exceptional games. Grading companies still operate, Heritage still auctions games, and the infrastructure built during the boom remains.

Wata itself eventually disappeared as a standalone brand. In September 2025, PSA announced that Wata was becoming PSA, and by 2026 PSA described the transition as an official rebranding.

So the bubble left something behind.

It permanently changed video game collecting.

Whether that’s good depends on what you think collecting is supposed to be.

For me, the appeal of retro games has always been the games themselves. Their history, their artwork, the memories attached to them and, most importantly, actually experiencing them.

I can understand wanting a beautiful boxed copy sitting on a shelf.

I can even understand wanting an unopened copy of something particularly meaningful.

What I have a much harder time celebrating is turning those games into financial instruments whose owners couldn’t care less about the games inside.

Because once a collectible becomes primarily an investment, the collector interested in the object itself becomes almost incidental.

The irony is hard to miss.

The most expensive copies of some of the greatest video games ever created became valuable precisely because nobody would ever play them.

And for a hobby built around playing games, that’s a pretty strange definition of winning.