The 10 most expensive toys and games ever auctioned

Toys are made to be broken. That is the point of them, and it is also why the ones that survive in their boxes, unplayed with, end up in salerooms next to paintings. A toy in perfect condition is evidence that a child was denied something.

A warning before the list. A great many of the toy prices that circulate online are not auction results at all. The famous prototype Hot Wheels car, the record-setting graded Pokémon card, several of the six-figure action figures: those changed hands privately, between dealers and collectors, and nobody is obliged to publish the real number. Everything below was sold in a public sale, with a house and a date attached. And because a ranking that hops between currencies ranks nothing, every heading gives the sum in US dollars, with the money the lot was actually knocked down in in brackets behind it.

1. Steiff Louis Vuitton teddy bear — $2.1 million

Sold at a charity auction in Monaco in 2000, and still the most expensive teddy bear ever sold. It was made by Steiff in a Louis Vuitton monogram fabric, with eyes of sapphire and diamond and gold fittings, and it exists only because the sale existed. It went to a Korean buyer and ended up in a teddy bear museum. The most expensive toy on this page was a fundraising lot, which is worth remembering.

2. Super Mario 64, sealed — $1,560,000

Heritage Auctions, July 2021. A factory-sealed, graded copy of the 1996 Nintendo 64 game, and the highest price ever paid for a video game at auction. Millions of copies were sold; almost nobody kept one shut. What was being bid on was not the game but the seal, verified by a third-party grading company, which is the same logic that governs coins and comics.

3. A Lewis chessman, twelfth century — almost $1 million (£735,000)

Sotheby's, London, July 2019, a record for a medieval chess piece. The Lewis chessmen were found on the Isle of Lewis in 1831 and are mostly in the British Museum, but five pieces were missing. This one, a warder, had been bought by an Edinburgh antiques dealer for five pounds in 1964 and kept in a drawer by his family, unrecognised, for fifty-five years. Walrus ivory, about four inches high.

4. Märklin "Amerika" ocean liner — $271,400

Bertoia Auctions, May 2016, from an attic. The German firm Märklin made large tinplate boats in the early twentieth century and this one is thirty-eight inches long, with its lifeboats, masts and four funnels still attached. It sold for almost four times its high estimate to an anonymous European buyer. Bertoia's own explanation for the condition was that decades of dust had protected the paint.

5. Märklin "Chicago" paddlewheeler — $264,000

Bertoia Auctions, November 2012, from the Dick Claus collection. It held the world record for a toy boat until the Amerika beat it four years later. Two boats by the same maker at the top of the same category is not a coincidence: Märklin's tinplate was expensive when new, which meant fewer of them and more careful owners.

6. Steiff "Teddy Girl", 1904 — about $165,000

Sold at auction in 1994, a record for a teddy bear that stood for years. She is one of the earliest Steiff bears, from the first years of production, and had belonged to a single English family who had photographs of her being carried about. Provenance in the toy world usually means a family album rather than a certificate.

7. Super Mario Bros., sealed — $114,000

Sold in July 2020, and at that moment the highest price ever paid for a single video game. A year earlier, in 2019, a comparable sealed copy had made a little over $100,000, which was itself treated as extraordinary. The jump from a hundred thousand to a million and a half in two years is the fastest revaluation of any category here, and not everyone in the trade thinks it will hold.

8. Märklin clown car, 1909 — $103,500

Bertoia Auctions, April 2009, from the Donald Kaufman collection. A hand-painted tinplate clown driving a cart, estimated at thirty to forty thousand dollars and sold for more than twice the top figure to an anonymous European bidder. It is a toy most collectors had only ever seen in reference books, which is generally what it takes to produce a result like that.

9. Steiff Harlequin bear, 1925 — about $74,000 (£46,850)

Christie's, London, October 2010, part of a single collection that made about a million pounds in one afternoon. The bear is half red mohair and half blue, with one blue eye and one brown, and it was already showing wear and fading when it was catalogued. Condition matters less than it seems when the object is genuinely unusual.

10. Francis, Field and Francis tinplate train, about 1850 — $64,900

Bertoia Auctions, May 2016. American tin from the middle of the nineteenth century almost always shows repainting or resoldering, because the toys were repaired rather than replaced. This one had neither. It was estimated at fifteen to twenty-five thousand dollars and sold to a collector who had come to the field only recently, which happens more often than the trade admits.

What this means for a table of donated lots

The first lesson is the one at the top of the list. The most valuable toy ever sold at auction was sold for a cause, made specially for that sale, and could not have been bought anywhere else. Fundraising evenings have a power that ordinary salerooms do not: a donor can create an object that does not otherwise exist. A weekend at someone's cottage, a portrait by a local painter, a named seat at a dinner. Those lots consistently outperform the retail goods on the same table, and the page for charities and galas works through how to ask for them.

The second is that grading and evidence turn a familiar object into a rare one. Nobody paid a million and a half dollars for a game cartridge; they paid it for a sealed box with a number on the case. You will not have graders, but you have the same tool in weaker form: say what condition the item is in, say who owned it, and say what makes this one different from the one online. The guide has a section on writing that down without overselling it.

The third is that the private sales are invisible for a reason. An auction publishes its result, which is why these figures exist to be argued about at all. In a charity room the same transparency does real work: a running total on the screen tells guests that the evening is going well, and people bid differently when they can see that. That behaviour is described on the how it works page.

If you want to see how a lot list behaves before you commit to anything, you can build one and rehearse the whole evening first. Start at getting started, and the help pages cover the practical questions.

Prices as reported at the time of sale, including buyer's premium where the house stated it.