An original 1981 Donkey Kong promotional poster has sold for $329,400, establishing a new record for the most expensive piece of original video game art sold at auction. The striking result is especially notable because the poster, created for Nintendo of America during the arcade game's early life, was once among materials designated to be discarded.
The artwork captures a moment before Nintendo's most recognizable character had become Mario as generations of players know him. In the image, the hero is still identified as Jumpman, scaling the structure beneath Donkey Kong in an attempt to rescue Pauline. The scene is a vivid artifact from the beginning of a character and series that would grow into one of entertainment's largest franchises.
Landry Pop Auctions handled the sale as part of Jumpman: The Beginning of an Icon, an event centered on rare Nintendo production material, character art, collectibles, and company history. The $329,400 winning bid did more than surpass expectations for a collectible poster: it dramatically reset the ceiling for original artwork connected to video games.
A piece of Nintendo history saved from disposal
The poster's survival is central to its remarkable story. Former Nintendo of America employee Donna Darbous saved it from a group of items marked for disposal. Rather than disappearing with other corporate materials, the flyer endured long enough to become a highly prized example of the earliest visual language behind Donkey Kong and its then-new central character.
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Artist Leslie Cabarga drew the work as an arcade flyer for Nintendo of America. Its composition presents Donkey Kong in an imposing pose, angrily lifting a barrel overhead, while Jumpman works his way upward. Pauline, the woman at the center of the arcade game's rescue premise, is shown in danger behind her enormous captor.
That imagery is instantly legible to modern audiences, but it belongs to a particularly important point in Nintendo history. Donkey Kong arrived in 1981, when the company was still building its presence in the arcade business. The game introduced the character who would eventually be renamed Mario and become Nintendo's defining mascot. It also helped establish a design legacy that stretched across arcade cabinets, home consoles, animation, merchandise, films, and decades of new games.
For collectors, this makes the poster more than a vintage advertisement. It is a surviving piece of production-era art from before Mario's identity, appearance, and wider cultural role had fully settled into the familiar form recognized today.
A new benchmark for original game art
Before this sale, the reported record for original video game artwork at auction belonged to the original cover art for Prince of Persia. That piece sold for $63,000 in 2023. The Donkey Kong flyer's $329,400 final price exceeds that earlier benchmark by $266,400.
The gap illustrates the unusual combination of factors surrounding the Nintendo piece: its age, direct ties to Mario's first public appearance, original hand-drawn status, strong visual connection to a beloved arcade game, and extraordinary survival story. While sealed games and trading cards often command headlines in the collectible market, original promotional and production artwork is inherently scarce. A game can have multiple copies in circulation, even decades later, while a specific original illustration may be one of a kind.
The poster also sits at the intersection of two collecting fields. It has significance as video game history, but it is equally relevant to animation, illustration, advertising design, corporate ephemera, and popular-culture art. Its value is inseparable from Mario's present-day status, yet its appeal also comes from showing Nintendo's character work before it became standardized across a global empire.
Long before Mario became the face of a multibillion-dollar entertainment franchise, he was a character on an arcade flyer. The $329,400 result is a striking reminder of how far Nintendo's most famous plumber has come, and how valuable the surviving artwork from his earliest days has become.
Other Mario artifacts beat their estimates
The auction's focus extended beyond the record-setting Donkey Kong image. Additional lots from Nintendo's history produced notable results, including original art connected to Super Mario Bros. and early illustrations of enemies that would become fixtures of the series.
Original Mario and Luigi artwork from Super Mario Bros. sold for $17,080. The result came in at nearly three times the item's $6,000 estimate, underlining the collector interest in original depictions of the brothers from the era that transformed Mario from an arcade character into the face of Nintendo's home-console business.
Artwork of a Goomba, one of the Mushroom Kingdom's most enduring adversaries, reached $10,370. That was more than double its $5,000 estimate. Goombas are now among the most immediately recognizable enemy designs in games, and early original illustrations offer a direct view into how Nintendo's characters were developed and communicated beyond the pixels of an NES screen.
The event also included a first-production 1985 copy of Super Mario Bros. for the NES. Graded 8.0 by PSA, the game sold for $34,160. Meanwhile, a Nintendo of America employee orientation VHS tape featuring Mario achieved $3,660, well above its $1,500 estimate. That tape is a different kind of collectible than a poster or game cartridge, but it preserves another side of the company's history: the ways Nintendo presented its identity and characters within its own workplace.
Why early Nintendo art matters
Video game preservation is often discussed in terms of playable software, working hardware, source code, manuals, and packaging. The auction results demonstrate why original artwork and internal promotional material matter as well. They record stages of a game's public presentation that can be difficult to reconstruct once campaigns end, offices move, and corporate archives are cleared out.
In the case of Donkey Kong, the poster preserves the early dramatic framework of the game: an antagonist at the top of a structure, a captive character awaiting rescue, and Jumpman navigating a dangerous vertical ascent. Those elements were foundational to the game's appeal, even as the characters' names and roles evolved in later Nintendo releases.
Mario's history has made the flyer especially potent. What began as an arcade character called Jumpman became the star of Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros., and a long list of platforming, racing, role-playing, sports, and party games. The character's reach now extends far beyond games, which gives early physical artifacts a level of cultural relevance that few pieces of arcade advertising could have anticipated in 1981.
There is also a difference between a reproduction and an original illustration used in a campaign's creation. Posters can be reprinted, scanned, or recreated, but an original piece retains its direct physical link to the artists, marketing work, and moment that produced it. For collectors, that provenance can be as meaningful as the image itself.
A market still producing eye-catching results
The Donkey Kong result arrives during a period of high-profile game-related auction sales. Earlier in October, a retired decorator in the United Kingdom sold a Pokémon card collection for $2 million. In June, a PSA-graded 9.6 A++ copy of Super Mario Bros. for NES sold for $3 million, setting the reported record for the most expensive video game sold at auction.
Those sales involve different kinds of collectibles, from trading cards to sealed games and original artwork, but they share a common thread: the market places substantial value on rarity, condition, cultural importance, and a clear connection to landmark moments in gaming. The Donkey Kong flyer differs from a sealed retail game in one key respect, however. Its importance comes not only from scarcity but from being an original visual object tied to Mario's earliest public identity.
At $329,400, the poster now stands as the leading auction example for original game art. Its path from a disposal pile to a record-setting sale also gives it a story that is difficult to separate from the final price. A discarded piece of Nintendo's past has become one of the most valuable surviving documents of the company's early creative history.
For fans, the image remains a snapshot of Jumpman's climb toward Pauline. For collectors and preservation-minded observers, it has become something larger: evidence that gaming's foundational art can carry immense historical and financial value when it survives long enough to be recognized.
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