According to Statista, Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the tech industry, followed by Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. Big surprise, right? But how do they compare to the richest characters in video games? If you’re confused, don’t be; NetCredit did all the math and currency conversions to determine definitively which character makes the most in in-game currency.
The study found that Nintendo’s Mario is easily the richest character in gaming, having amassed $805,676,122,480 in net worth by gathering in-game currency over the life of the series. The next highest earners are Ratchet and Clank, the stars of the newly released Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart for PlayStation 5, who have managed to amass $467,999,997 in personal wealth
Mario’s massive personal worth easily eclipses Bezos’ $177 billion valuation. Only by combining the riches of all four tech leaders does their $549 billion total beat out Ratchet and Clank. From this point, though, there is a significant drop in valuation among video game characters.
Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect series is worth $6,391,999, while Sonic the Hedgehog has accumulated $2,193,845 in personal wealth. Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII has a $1,818,182 value. and Sora from the Kingdom Hearts series is worth $1,733,328 in total.
Other characters included in the study were Pokémon Trainer, Banjo from the Banjo-Kazooie series, Link from The Legend of Zelda, Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher series, Spyro, and Donkey Kong.
In case you’re a little dubious, NetCredit has shown its work. All valuations are based on how much in-game currency these characters can collect and the real-world valuations of in-game items. For instance, Sonic can purchase a green gem for 5,000 rings. A gem the size of your hand would cost around $1,400, which means one ring is equal to about $58.85 in real-world money.
Other in-game currencies have become overly inflated by comparison. Since a watermelon in The Witcher series costs 10 crowns, compared to the $3 price tag in real life, the currency on the Continent is worth only around 30 cents in the US. Similarly, a boomerang costs 300 rupees in Zelda, so a single rupee may be worth only about 10 cents.
Tragically, a bottle of water costs 200 Pokémon Dollars, which means one unit of this currency is a mere $0.0075 of a US dollar.
So why is Mario worth so much money? According to NetCredit’s logic, 100 in-game coins gives you an extra life, and an extra life is essentially just like real-world health insurance. A human life is valued at $8 million by the industry, so by that logic, one coin is basically $80,000. Mario is also helped by the fact that New Super Mario Bros. 2 for the 3DS contains nearly $800 trillion in coins to collect. Meanwhile, Donkey Kong Returns on the Wii contains the equivalent of just $89 in total.
