Cognition Dissemination: The Good, Bad, and Bizarre Aspects of Mario’s 35th Anniversary Celebration

Nintendo finally announced their plans for the 35th anniversary of the Mario Bros. brand after months of rumors, through a surprise Nintendo Direct directly to YouTube. A Super Mario 3D All-Stars package is coming to Switch, including remastered versions of Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy. A Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch is also coming, which will include Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (aka Super Mario Bros. 2 in Japan), and Game & Watch: Ball. Super Mario 3D World will also be the latest Wii U port coming to Switch, coming with a Bowser’s Fury expansion. Basically, they’re giving the long-running franchise the grand treatment it deserves.

There’s also this Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit thing, a cool-looking kit where players (mostly kids) can use their Switches to control physical miniature karts. The trailer suggests it will require a lot of room to use.

There’s a lot of good from this announcement, but we’re talking about Nintendo here. Some are bad, while others are plain bizarre and raise more questions than answers. This is a company that will never change, for better and worse.

What makes the Super Mario 3D All-Stars package great is how two games included have never been rereleased. There have been a small number of legal options to play SM64 previously, through the Virtual Consoles and the DS port. But Sunshine and Galaxy are being ported for the first time, and they’re treating them like it. All three games will have upgraded textures to look as good as possible without giving them the full remake treatment on an HD screen. Though SM64 will still be in a 4:3 ratio, Sunshine will now be in a widescreen ratio. Galaxy, of course, was always in widescreen.

There’s a catch here: You only have until the end of March 2021 to get this, both physically and digitally. This is presumably being done for the same reason the Wii port of Super Mario All-Stars was limited, because, well, who the hell actually knows? Maybe Nintendo wants to increase the desire for Switch owners to buy this as soon as possible, especially in a physical form, thanks to the pandemic, a time when digital sales have increased thanks to everyone remaining at home for more time. The only other reason they could be doing this is to create artificial demand, even though ports of three fantastic Mario games damn well should be around forever.

You’ll notice something else fishy here, which you’re likely aware of by now: Where the hell is Super Mario Galaxy 2? The original Super Mario All-Stars collection on Super Nintendo (available for Switch NOW) was feature complete, and though the Wii port lacked Super Mario World (sorry, I don’t count Yoshi’s Island as a Mario game per se), it was nonetheless available through the VC. SMG2 will remain Wii-exclusive for now thanks to this, meaning the actual name of the package is Super Mario 3D All-Stars*. If there’s a good reason for the exclusion, Nintendo should explain it. If not, hopefully they’ll release it separately in the near future, though the best opportunity to do so would have been on this very collection.

The 3D All-Stars package will release in a mere 13 days from now, on September 18th. You might want to get it as soon as possible.

The Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. system looks nice, but also represents the kind of craziness only Nintendo is capable of. They’re really charging $49.99 (or an equivalent) for ports of two NES Mario games, and a small third one. And the ports look a little, let’s say, different than previous versions. But it is a nice-looking system, and it’s bound to be a collector’s item. It will release on November 13th, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it became a collector’s item in a short time.

It’s good that Nintendo is releasing Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, another port of a game released on the worst-selling console in the company’s history. This will give fans a chance to actually play it. Not to say it sold badly on Wii U, but like other ports from the system, chances are it will sell better on Switch. The Bowser’s Fury expansion could help it sell, depending on how expansive it will be.

The port won’t arrive until February 12th, an unfortunate date for a couple of reasons. It won’t make the anniversary year, likely due to the desire to clear space for the 3D All-Stars package. But Nintendo currently has nothing coming this fall outside the package and Pikmin 3 Deluxe. There’s a great possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic delayed several games in development, but this would make for the emptiest holiday season for Nintendo in a while if they have nothing else. Don’t rule out the chance of them announcing and quickly releasing more games, similar to Paper Mario: The Origami King in July. But they may not need anything besides the 3D All-Stars collection for Switch to sell bucketloads this fall.

The extremely Nintendo hitches notwithstanding, they’re celebrating Mario’s 35th anniversary in style. It has me looking forward to what they’ll do for The Legend of Zelda’s anniversary next year, which we’ll hopefully see early in the year. I hope they at least port the Wii U versions of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. There could also be something else.