The history of grading
From a doctor's scale in 1949 to a video game sold like a work of art. Over seventy years of a single idea: turning the judgement on a collectible into a number you can trust.
A judgement that becomes currency
Before grading, the condition of an item was an opinion: the seller's. Two collectors could look at the same coin and call it two different things, and the entire difference in price lived inside that gap. Grading was born to settle that argument for good, handing the judgement to an independent third party and sealing it inside the item.
The problem is as old as collecting itself. Even in the 19th century, faced with the same coin, two experts could write two different verdicts, and every word more or less moved the price. The more serious the market became, the more that vagueness turned into a cost: what was needed was a shared yardstick, not the seller's eye.
The answer, when it came, was as simple as it was revolutionary: take the judgement out of the seller's hands and give it to a third party with no stake in the deal, one that assigns a grade on a public scale and seals it inside the object, where no one can alter it again. From that moment the grade counts for more than personal trust: it holds for everyone, everywhere.
It is the same formula that, category after category, has rewritten collecting: coins, comics, cards, video games. And every time it rests on the same five pillars, invented one after another in the world of coins and then exported everywhere. This page is the story of how such a simple idea became a global industry.
Why it's here. Five centuries before grading, a coin's condition is already a human judgement: two tax collectors weigh it, examine it and record it by hand in the ledger. It is the exact problem this story begins from, the value of an object left to the opinion of whoever handles it.
Photo · Sailko, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 3.0Authentication
An independent expert verifies that the item is genuine and untampered.
Shared scale
A single number, the same for everyone, instead of elastic adjectives like "excellent".
Encapsulation
The item is sealed in a tamper-evident case: the grade stays bound to the piece.
Guarantee
Whoever assigns the grade stands behind it, often with money too.
Population report
A public census: how many pieces exist at each grade. Rarity becomes measurable.
Seventy years in one column
The milestones that built, brick by brick, the modern idea of grading.
Dr William Sheldon introduces the 70-point scale and, for the first time, ties a coin's grade to its value, the idea he would make famous with Penny Whimsy. It is the DNA of every grading system to come.
Robert Overstreet publishes the first comic book price guide and standardises the language of condition.
The ANA certifies its first coin. At first it is not grading, it is authentication.
A group of dealers seals coins in tamper-evident capsules with the grade printed on them. The "slab" is born, and with it the modern market.
PCGS founder David Hall applies the model to sports cards.
Pop culture enters the slab. The comic becomes an asset with a grade from 0.5 to 10.
It is the first to grade and encapsulate sealed video games, on a historic 0 to 100 scale.
Wata Games professionalises sealed-game grading; in January 2019 Heritage Auctions begins accepting its pieces.
A sealed Super Mario 64 graded Wata 9.8 A++ sells for $1.56 million.
The Games Market brings seventy years of these five pillars to Europe and joins them with proprietary technology. It is the first collectible video game grading company with a management system certified to ISO 9001:2015 by Bureau Veritas. The story continues, now.
Numismatics
It all begins with coins. This is where grading is invented, pillar by pillar: authentication, the scale, the slab, the guarantee and the census of pieces. Everything we take for granted today started with a handful of stubborn numismatists.
Adjectives without a ruler
Throughout the 19th century a coin's condition was told in words: Good, Fine, Very Fine, Uncirculated. The trouble is that words are elastic. The more collecting professionalised, the more sellers invented flattering labels: "nearly Uncirculated", "brilliant with light cabinet friction". The same coin could carry different descriptions depending on who was selling it, and the gap mattered most exactly where the money was largest.
The breakthrough came in 1949 from an unlikely figure: William Sheldon, a psychologist and avid collector of US large cents. In his book, later famous as Penny Whimsy, he built a 1 to 70 scale in which the grade reflected the coin's value. An ordinary 1794 cent worth about a dollar was a "1"; one worth about seventy dollars was a "70". The grade, literally, was the price.
The slab changes everything
In 1972 the American Numismatic Association created ANACS, the first third-party service: at first only authentication, the hunt for fakes. The decisive leap came in 1986, when a group of dealers founded PCGS and brought one brilliant idea to market: sealing each coin in a hard plastic capsule, ultrasonically welded and impossible to open without leaving a trace, with the grade printed on top. The "slab" was born.
The first capsules were nicknamed rattlers, because the coin inside shifted slightly. Yet they changed history: PCGS opened on 3 February 1986 with 32 dealers and was buried under some 18,000 coins in its first month. With the slab came sight-unseen trading: you could buy a coin without seeing it, because the grade was enough. The rare became a near-financial asset. In 1987 came NGC (Numismatic Guaranty Company), founded by John Albanese, a PCGS partner who left to build the rival. The two houses still dominate today.
One detail says everything about how quickly grading became a craze: in its second month PCGS received another 35,000 coins, almost double the first. And those earliest cases, the rattlers, now carry a premium precisely because they came first: you pay for the coin and for the capsule that holds it.
Comics
From coins to print. Grading meets Superman, and in twenty years a newsstand comic becomes a million-dollar asset, with a grade from 0.5 to 10 for an identity card.
First the guide, then the slab
In 1970 Robert Overstreet published the first Comic Book Price Guide: 218 pages, five dollars, a thousand copies. It did more than list prices: it set a shared vocabulary of condition, from Mint to Poor. For thirty years "what grade is it?" was answered by leafing through that guide. But it was still an opinion, and the arguments never ended.
The turning point was 2000, when CGC brought the coin slab to comics: an impartial third party assigns a grade from 0.5 to 10.0 and seals the book in a case with a numbered label. From that moment a "CGC 9.8" is a 9.8 to everyone. The buyer-seller argument vanished from the transaction. CGC reports more than 20 million items certified since.
The effect on prices was explosive, because the slab makes a seven-figure number defensible. The signature trophy is Action Comics #1, Superman's 1938 debut: a CGC 9.0 copy hit $3.2 million in 2014, a CGC 8.5 reached $6 million at Heritage in 2024. In November 2025 a CGC 9.0 Superman #1 set the all-time comics record at $9.12 million.
A few curiosities along the way. Before comics, Overstreet collected arrowheads, and his first price list, never published, was for relics. The very first comic CGC sealed, on 9 November 1999, was a Walt Disney's Comics & Stories #1, serial number 0000001001. And to lock down autographs CGC invented the witnessed signature: the book is signed in front of an official and sealed on the spot, so not even a Stan Lee signature can be disputed.
Action Comics #1: the climb
The same title, Superman's 1938 debut. Every record figure is tied to a CGC-graded copy. The 2026 value is a private sale.
Cards
Sports and trading card games. This is where grading stops being a specialist's affair and becomes a phenomenon for millions, between home runs, eBay and a Pikachu worth as much as a mansion.
PSA and trust regained
Before 1991 the card market was a minefield: fakes, trimmed corners, recoloured edges. David Hall, the man behind PCGS coins, transplanted the formula onto cards and founded PSA: an expert grades on a 1 to 10 scale judging centring, corners, edges and surface, then seals the card. At first dealers feared it and PSA lost money, but eBay and the 1998 McGwire-versus-Sosa home-run chase made grading the standard. Then came, in 1998, SGC (Sportscard Guaranty Corporation) and, in 1999, BGS (Beckett Grading Services), famous for its sub-grades and the "Black Label", a perfect ten across all four.
Grading makes the records possible. The 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle graded SGC 9.5 sold at Heritage for $12.6 million in 2022, then the most valuable sports collectible ever. In the Pokémon world the only Pikachu Illustrator PSA 10 went to Logan Paul for $5.275 million in 2022 and was resold for over $16.5 million in 2026. In every case, the grade on the slab is the thing being bought.
Two curiosities explain the legend. The T206 Honus Wagner is so rare because Wagner himself had his card pulled from production, and only a few dozen survived. And PSA, a giant today, lost about $10,000 a month in its first three years: dealers feared that an official grade would expose the flaws in their stock.
The grading explosion
Cards graded each year by the four major graders combined (PSA, CGC, SGC, Beckett). The chart shows 2023 to 2025: from 17 to 26.8 million pieces, up 32% in the final year. The surge began earlier, with the 2020 and 2021 pandemic boom that pushed backlogs to an estimated 10 to 12 million cards. The 2026 bar is a projection.
Video games
The youngest category, and the fastest. In just over four years the sealed video game goes from a niche for a few enthusiasts to auction hammers above a million, controversy included.
VGA, Wata and the Heritage alliance
The video game was the last category to reach the slab. In 2008 VGA, Video Game Authority, became the first to grade and seal sealed games, on a historic 0 to 100 scale. In 2018 came Wata Games, which aligned its scale with comics (a numeric grade from 0.5 to 10.0 plus a seal rating from C to A++) and struck an alliance with auction house Heritage, which from January 2019 began accepting its pieces.
The result was the fastest run-up collecting has ever seen. In February 2019 a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. broke $100,000 for the first time. In July 2021, at Heritage's first dedicated video-game auction, two records fell in two days: The Legend of Zelda at $870,000 and a Super Mario 64 graded Wata 9.8 A++ at $1.56 million, the first game past a million. In August, a copy of Super Mario Bros. reached $2 million on the Rally platform.
The $2 million Super Mario Bros. tells the story best: it never went through a traditional auction. The platform Rally had bought it for about $140,000 in 2020 and split it into shares among small investors; when the $2 million offer arrived, almost 80% voted to sell. A video game traded like a stock.
The controversy, told as it is
An honest history does not hide it. In August 2021 YouTuber Karl Jobst accused Wata and Heritage of conflicts of interest and of inflating prices to present games as investments. Both companies denied the claims, calling them "baseless". In May 2022 a class action was filed in California alleging market manipulation and unmet grading turnaround times. The final outcome of the case is not publicly clear.
The lesson for the sector is sharp: in a young market, the grader's credibility and independence from the auction houses are not a detail, they are the product.
In 2021 CGC, the comics grader, entered too, bringing its reputation. After the 2021 bubble, prices normalised, but grading is now infrastructure: today the leaders are PSA (which absorbed Wata), CGC and VGA, alongside newer, including regional, players.
The video game's leap
Record prices for sealed, graded video games, in millions of dollars. From a niche worth tens of thousands to a million in just over four years. The 2017 figure is a market reference; the August 2021 sale was on the Rally platform.
The numbers of a mature market
Four categories, one single idea, and growth that keeps going. Here are the figures that describe grading in 2025 and 2026.
The record by category
Highest public sale for each category, in millions of dollars. At public auction the video game, the youngest, still holds the lowest record.
An important caveat: these are public sales. For video games the record looks the lowest, but it is not the real figure: the biggest deals happen privately and go untracked. A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. reached $2 million back in 2021, away from the auction floor. The real ceiling is higher than the public market shows.
Why people grade
The three reasons a collector takes a piece to grading have stayed the same, from 1986 to today.
of cards graded by PSA in 2025 earned the top grade of "10". The very top stays rare and contested.
TGMGrading
the next chapter
Over seventy years of history built a method. The Games Market brings it to Europe and applies it to the collectible video game: the five pillars intact, proprietary technology that makes them stronger and, above all, a company with a management system certified to ISO 9001:2015 by Bureau Veritas: the external proof of the same seriousness we demand of every grade. Because when a market grows up, seriousness is what makes the difference. And we are writing this story right now.
Authentication
Verification of the piece, including X-ray on the sealed item without breaking the seal.
Shared scale
A clear, repeatable grade, with the method always visible behind the judgement.
Collector's case
Encapsulation that protects the piece and binds the grade to the item.
Guarantee
Documented, repeatable judgements that The Games Market stands behind.
Transparency
Every grade, price and judgement shows the method that produced it.
Sources and notes
Every figure on this page is verified against public sources and cited below. Private sales are flagged as such and kept distinct from auction records. Where market estimates diverge between firms, the order of magnitude is indicated.
Numismatics · The origins
- PCGS, A History of U.S. Rare Coin Grading · pcgs.com
- PCGS, William Sheldon's 70-Point Scale (1949) · pcgs.com
- CoinWeek, History of the First Third-Party Grading Service: ANACS · coinweek.com
- Coin World, Grading revolution in 1986 · coinworld.com
- Wikipedia, Sheldon coin grading scale, PCGS, NGC
Comics
- CGC, About CGC and Grading Scales · cgccomics.com
- CGC, Action Comics #1 Soars to $6 Million (2024) · cgccomics.com
- Heritage Auctions, Superman No. 1 at $9.12 million (2025) · comics.ha.com
- Overstreet Access, Grading Definitions · overstreetaccess.com
Cards
- Sports Collectors Digest, History of grading: PSA, BGS, SGC · sportscollectorsdigest.com
- CBS Sports / ESPN, 1952 Topps Mantle at $12.6 million (2022)
- Guinness World Records, Pikachu Illustrator (2022) · guinnessworldrecords.com
- CNN, Pikachu Illustrator at $16.5 million (2026)
- GemRate · Sports Illustrated, grading volumes 2023-2025
Video games
- Heritage Auctions, Super Mario 64 at $1.56 million (2021) · comics.ha.com
- Heritage Auctions, Legend of Zelda at $870,000 (2021)
- Engadget / CNBC, Super Mario Bros. at $2 million, Rally platform (2021)
- Kotaku · Nintendo Life · VGC, the allegations and the responses of Wata and Heritage (2021-2022)
- CGC, Video Game Grading (2021) · Wikipedia, Wata Games
Methodological note. Price comparisons across categories and across different graders (TGMGrading, VGA, Wata, CGC, PSA) should be read with care: each grader uses its own grading scale, so one grade is not automatically equivalent to another. Market figures shown as estimates or projections come from research firms with differing methodologies and are presented as orders of magnitude.