Someone Paid $2 Million for Three Pokemon Games
Three sealed copies of the original Pokemon games just sold for $2 million through a private brokerage called Nostalgix. Pokemon Blue (PSA 9.8), Red (PSA 10), and Yellow (PSA 10). First print copies. The buyer is the owner of something called the Dubai Collection.
That's the sale. Here's what's actually worth paying attention to.
The Grades
Getting a PSA 10 on a sealed Game Boy game from 1998 is genuinely hard. Cardboard degrades. Plastic yellows. Stickers peel. Two PSA 10s out of three copies, with the third landing at 9.8, is a legitimately remarkable set. Nathan Howerton, who owns and runs Nostalgix, called it the world's highest-graded first print collection among first print Pokemon games. The grades came from PSA, whose video game division is run by Claire Shelton.
The 9.8 on Blue is the "imperfect" one. Sitting next to two 10s. Almost feel bad for it.
Second Largest Ever. The First Place Is Weirder.
Two million dollars makes this the second-largest graded video game transaction ever completed. The largest was a copy of Super Mario Bros. for the NES that sold at auction for $3 million in June. That copy graded 9.6 from PSA, which is lower than the Pokemon Red and Yellow copies that just moved for $2 million combined. It sold for more anyway.
Market's weird like that.
The Super Mario Bros. record also has some relevant context: 97 pristine copies of Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt were discovered in a Wisconsin warehouse. Five of those copies received PSA grades of 10. So there are at least five perfect-grade copies of that game in existence. Scarcity arguments get complicated fast in this space.
Why This Is Going to Keep Happening
Sony is stopping the printing of physical games as of January 2028. That's not rumor. Once that deadline hits, every physical disc they've ever published becomes a finite artifact. The collectibles market already sees this coming.
Someone in Dubai spending $2 million on three Game Boy cartridges from 1998 is a bet that first-print physical media from significant releases will only get harder to find in pristine condition. Especially as major publishers exit physical entirely.
Probably not a wrong bet.
The Actual Game Part
None of this changes what the games are. Pokemon Red, Blue, and Yellow are still playable for almost nothing. Emulation is free. Used copies cost a few bucks. If you haven't played them, the games are worth your time at basically any price.
What just sold for $2 million isn't the experience. It's proof that something existed in a specific condition at a specific moment in time. A sealed artifact from 1998 that nobody opened. The Dubai Collection buyer apparently thinks that's worth seven figures.
Hard to argue when the market keeps proving them right.
Source: IGN