A copy of Super Mario Bros. on NES has been auctioned off for $660,000, making it the most expensive video game ever made.

Heritage Auctions has once again sold a Mario game for an exorbitant six-figure sum. The game happens to be the rarest, best-graded Mario Bros. copy in existence. The game was originally bought in 1986 as a Christmas present and sat in a desk for 35 years and remained in pristine condition.

This particular copy is the best-preserved copy of Super Mario Bros. that's ever been graded, complete with an A+ 9.6 WATA rating (the previous record-holder had an A+ 9.4 rating and sold for $114,000). That score means it's nearly perfect.

Insomniac Games is using machine learning to enhance in-game visuals on the PlayStation 5, and the studio could be working alongside Sony's AI division on experimental new technology.

Insomniac Games recently turned heads by confirming the PlayStation 5 can support machine learning. The team is using it in creative ways, starting with a new PS5 update for Spider-Man Miles Morales that significantly changes muscular appearance in the game. The new technique creates more realistic "muscle deformation," a term used in animation to describe how models are transformed and manipulated in 3D rigs.

According to Lead Character Technical Director Josh DiCarlo, the technique is using machine learning inference, which means Insomniac is feeding the algorithm data in real-time that's running on the PlayStation 5. DiCarlo says this technique doesn't come at a graphical hit.

Outriders might only be 2 days old, but some players are already farming endgame content. These gamers are curious: Will there be post-launch DLC? Maybe.

People Can Fly's new shooter Outriders isn't a week old yet, but the studio already has ideas for future playable missions, quests, and more. Outriders isn't a live game, so it won't get tons of tweaks and regular content updates like, say, Fallout 76. Instead, the studio says Outriders is a "complete" package. But that doesn't mean they're giving up on the franchise.

In a recent interview with Forbes, Outriders Creative Director Bartek Kmita says if the game does get DLC, it'll be in the form of meaty expansions, not piecemeal updates. New content isn't guaranteed though and is contingent on whether or not people like it (so far they do).

Outriders game developer People Can Fly asks fans not to judge their game too harshly due to the ongoing server woes.

Like any online game, Outriders is suffering from server instability at launch. The game released two days ago and has had connectivity issues ever since, with scores of players losing story progress and loot as they rubberband from servers. Tens of thousands of gamers are trying to play Outriders at once, and the servers are buckling under the weight.

Amidst tons of updates on server stability/progress and regular updates, People Can Fly is asking for players' understanding and patience: "As developers who have been working super hard for the last 5 years to make this game awesome, we really hope that you will judge the game rather than those teething troubles related to server issues. I tis frustrating for you and it is frustrating for us," the devs said on Twitter.

Outriders is now Square Enix's top Steam game in peak players, beating all other franchises and releases.

People Can Fly's new shooter-looter Outriders is exceedingly popular and has broken a big milestone on Steam. The game peaked at 111,953 players on Steam on its first day and is now Square Enix's top game insofar as peak users. Based on SteamDB numbers, Outriders had over 300% more peak players than Marvel's Avengers.

At first glance, it's hard to pinpoint why Outriders is so popular. Closer examination reveals popular player sentiment garnered by specific business decisions. One, the game doesn't sell anything. There's no microtransactions or battle passes. Once you buy the game, you get the full game--there's no monetization thrown in. Avengers, on the other hand, was widely panned for its excessive monetization.

A new challenge is circulating on the very popular app TikTok, and this new trend is called the "Blackout Challenge".

Reports have surfaced about Joshua Haileyesus, a 12-year-old boy from Colorado who attempted the blackout challenge but was found by his brother passed out on the bathroom floor. Joshua reportedly used a shoelace to choke himself to the point of blacking out and losing consciousness. Doctors have told the family that Joshua will not recover.

Joshua's father, Haileyesus Zeryihun, said, "Told me the bad news that he's not going to survive, he's not going to make it. I was begging them on the floor, pleading to see if they can give me some time, not to give up on him. If I just give up on him, I feel like I'm just walking away from my son." The father of the family warned that these types of "challenges" have serious consequences and that children should be taught how to decipher dangerous challenges from safe ones.

Timi, the developer behind mobile's #2 game Honor of Kings, has made more money than Activision, NetEase, EA, and Take-Two Interactive.

A single Tencent developer has made more money in 2020 that some of gaming's reigning titans. According to a new report from Reuters, Tencent's Timi studio (Call of Duty Mobile, Honor of Kings) has generated $10 billion in revenues in 2020. This eclipses 2020 revenues of heavy-hitting games-makers like Activision ($8 billion), NetEase ($7.9 billion), EA ($5.6 billion) and Take-Two Interactive ($3.2 billion).

Tencent generated a whopping $23.01 billion in yearly revenues, beating out Sony and becoming the industry's top-earning company in games revenues. Timi generated 43% of these earnings. Taking a quick glance at how its games performed gives more context. Honor of Kings pulled in $2.5 billion in earnings worldwide.

Old Xbox games are now playable directly from the cloud and will retain all performance and visual upgrades delivered on new Series S/X consoles.

At a time when Nintendo and Sony are leaving the past behind, Microsoft is propelling its gaming history forward. Xbox backwards compatibility is one of the most compelling reasons to stay within Microsoft's ecosystem; the Series X being able to play four generations of Xbox games is a big selling point. The Series X is just one part of the ecosystem, though, and backward compatibility is now available to mobile devices.

Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can now stream old-school Xbox and Xbox 360 games directly to tablets and smartphones. Right now the list only includes 16 games (Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout New Vegas among them) but more are coming. One surprising part is how these games will still play better on mobiles than they do on their original hardware, benefiting from extras like FPS Boost.

With ray-traced lighting, native 4K textures, and boosted frame rates, Resident Evil 8 will shine brightest on PS5 and Xbox Series X. It's still a looker on last-gen, though.

Resident Evil 8 was first announced as a next-gen exclusive, but Capcom is now releasing a PS4 and Xbox version too. This is a smart (and arguably necessary) move since no one can buy next-gen consoles right now. Capcom wants to sell 10 million copies of RE8 on all platforms and to do that they'll need to release the game on hardware that people can actually buy (or already own).

Releasing a cross-gen port brings stress, but Capcom has risen to the occasion. New footage from IGN shows RE8 actually looks great on the PS4 Pro. There's no distinct FPS drops (at least in the footage we've seen) and the combat looks quite smooth.

The ESA had tentative plans to monetize E3 2021 by charging viewers a fee for certain interactive content, sources tell VideoGameChronicle.

What's going on with E3 2021? Will it be digital? Is the ESA charging money to view content? Yes, and no. The Los Angeles Department of Convention and Tourism previously said E3 2021 was cancelled, but it now says E3 2021 will be "mostly digital".

Now what about having to pay to watch E3 2021? That won't happen. The ESA confirms E3 2021 won't be pay-per-view. "E3's 2021 digital show is a free event for all attendees. We're excited to fill you in on all the real news for the event very soon," the ESA said on Twitter.

If you thought it was just graphics cards and next-gen gaming consoles that were in massive global shortages, other electronic components are about to join that -- right into the second half of 2022.

Apple supplier Foxconn has joined other technology giants that are adding to the dark times of global chip shortages, with Foxconn being the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer. When they warn of shortages, the world needs to listen. Foxconn isn't just Apple's main supplier, but the company makes components for thousands of companies and some of the biggest brands in the world.

Foxconn CEO Young Liu explained to investors during the company's latest earnings call: "The [supply in the] first two months of this quarter was still ok, as our clients are all very big, but we started to see changes happening this month". Liu said that Foxconn would not be able to fulfil less than 10% of its orders due to the component shortage.

The Mandalorian has some incredible special effects that were driven by interesting, and familiar technologies -- first, Unreal Engine is heavily used and second they used a gigantic LED wall that replaces physical sets and gives the directors and actors an entire new world to play in. Check it out:

Industrial Light & Magic have released a new video detailing the upgrades they did to the huge StageCraft 2.0 that super-powered The Mandalorian S2. The gigantic LED-wall was massively expanded and updated with new technology for the new season of The Mandalorian, with ILM using their new Helios technology -- the company's first cinematic render engine designed for real-time visual effects.

Helios has been "engineered from the ground up with film and television production in mind, Helios offers incredible performance, high fidelity real-time ray tracing, the ability to rip through scenes of unparalleled complexity, all while leveraging ILM's unrivaled color science, and was designed from the start to work seamlessly with ILM StageCraft".

Intel has finally launched its Rocket Lake-S family of processors with the flagship Core i9-11900K chip being put through its paces, and cooled with LN2 cooling to break some OC world records.

The world's best overclockers have got their hands-on the new Rocket Lake-S processors and pushed the flagship Core i9-11900K past 7GHz and even cranked DDR4 speeds through the roof, pushing DDR4-7156MHz which is simply insane. A bunch of different motherboards were used by different overclockers including the GIGABYTE Z590 AORUS Tachyon, MSI MEG Z590I Unify, ASUS ROG Maximus XIII APEX, and the ASRock Z590 OC Formula motherboards.

ASUS took to their official Twitter to shout from the roof tops that their ROG Maximus XIII Apex motherboard was used for some extreme overclocking sessions with overclocker "Raud" breaking the long-standing 4 minute barrier in the SuperPi 32M test using the ASUS ROG Maximus XIII Apex motherboard with an Intel Core i9-11900K processor and LN2 cooling. He reached an insane 7304MHz on the CPU and secured 10 world records and 7 global first places for ASUS.

NVIDIA's new CMP mining cards have a new customer with one of the biggest and oldest Bitcoin mining companies securing $30 million worth of the new CMP mining cards from NVIDIA.

Hut 8 Mining Corp. will have the first batches of NVIDIA's new CMP mining cards arrive in May, with all of the GPUs expected to be installed and cranked up into mining Bitcoin by the summer. Hut 8's mining capacity will be expanded by 1600GH/s which is the same as around 13,333 x NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards when it comes to mining hash rate power (they do around 90-120MH/s each).

CEO Jaime Leverton explained: "The adoption and the development of applications interacting with various blockchain networks have never been stronger, opening many possibilities across a variety of industries. We are incredibly excited to have these high performance CMPs in our fleet. We believe mining with CMPs will open up new opportunities for Hut 8 and will allow us to continue to execute on our long- and short-term plans for increased and diversified revenue streams".

GIGABYTE has just teased its new AORUS FV43U -- a huge new 43-inch 4K 144Hz gaming monitor with HDMI 2.1 connectivity. The new monitor was debuted at an in-person event in Vietnam, check it out:

The company is using Quantum Dot technology on its huge new AORUS FV43U gaming monitor, with a native 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution and super-fast 144Hz refresh rate. There's no confirmation on the HDMI 2.1 port but it would be crazy of GIGABYTE to launch a new 43-inch 4K 144Hz monitor without HDMI 2.1 connectivity in 2021.

The new AORUS FV43U has a 10-bit panel with 97% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut with peak brightness of 1000 nits and DisplayHDR 1000 certification. GIGABYTE has a super-fast 1ms MPRT (moving picture response time) on the monitor, ready for your gaming PC or next-gen PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S console.

Apple has just announced that it will be building a huge new "grid-scale" energy-storage facility in California, where the iGiant will be storing 240 megawatt-hours of energy.

The company will be tying this new grid-scale energy-storage facility directly from its 130-megawatt solar farm, which Apple built to power daytime energy requirements for its HQ in Cupertino, California. Apple adds that it will see 110 of its manufacturing partners moving to 100% renewable energy -- a move Apple is pushing along its entire supply chain and products to be carbon neutral by 2030.

Apple explains: "Sharing the experience gained through Apple's own transition to 100 percent renewable energy with its suppliers, the company introduces suppliers to resources and training materials with country-specific information to guide them in their transition to renewables".

TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) has just announced it will be spending a mind-boggling $100 billion on expanding its chip fabrication capacity, as we are in dire straits with chip production right now with silicon shortages worldwide.

The company has already got $28 billion invested into its expansions this year to keep up with the next-gen waves of 5nm and 3nm nodes, but this new $100 billion will be used to expand chip production capacity.

TSMC explains: "TSMC expects to invest USD$100b over the next three years to increase capacity to support the manufacturing and R&D of advanced semiconductor technologies. TSMC is working closely with our customers to address their needs in a sustainable manner".

ADATA has just revealed its new XPG GAMMIX S70 BLADE PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 2280 SSD, packing the PCIe 4.0 interface and some ridiculous speeds for even the craziest of demands.

The new ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 BLADE PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 2280 has huge sequential read speeds of up to 7400MB/sec (7.4GB/sec) and sequential reads of up to 6400MB/sec (6.4GB/sec) -- twice the speeds possible from the previous-gen PCIe 3.0 standard and an insane 15x the speed provided by SATA SSDs.

ADATA is making its new high-end XPG GAMMIX S70 BLADE PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 2280 SSD available in capacities of up to 2TB, with a large 5-year warranty on top. ADATA is using a slim temperature-resistant aluminum heat sink on the GAMMIX S70 BLADE SSD which "gets rid of heat effectively. So effective it can reduce temperatures by up to twenty percent. Plus, the heat sink looks cool too with its geometric ridges".

Spatial today announced a major update to its virtual collaboration platform that enables more realistic virtual environments modelled from real-world locations. The company is also making Spatial available for new devices to make the platform accessible to almost anyone.

Spatial started life as an augmented reality co-location system that would enable anyone with a Hololens or Magic Leap headset to meet remotely with other people with AR devices. The system includes a virtual avatar that can be projected into a remote location. If you want to get fancy, you could even use a 3D scan of your body as your avatar.

Now you can get even fancier by bringing scanned objects and environments into the mix. The new Spatial update enables you to bring high-fidelity LiDAR scans into the platform, which you can use to recreate real-world environments to use as virtual meeting places. You can also import virtual copies of real objects into your virtual meeting space, making virtual collaboration feel a bit closer to the real thing.

Have you ever wondered who is funding politicians? Well, now you can find out, and it's all thanks to this 18-year-old entrepreneur.

18-year-old Nick Rubin has created a free browser plugin application that allows citizens to find out how much funding members of Congress are receiving, who they received it from, how that money influences elections, and how the Congress member made. The plugin is titled Greenhouse and is currently supported by Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Once the application is installed and you are looking at an article with a politician's name, the app will showcase that politician's top ten monetary influences. Rubin stated to Vice, "Greenhouse allows people to see the money story behind the news story." One of the app's sources of data is OpenSecrets.org, which is the official website for The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan and nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C. who tracks where the money used in politics is coming from.