Today, Nintendo held the Super Mario 35th Anniversary Nintendo Direct and announced what players have been speculating for months now: Super Mario 3D All-Stars.
The collection bundles together Mario’s first three big excursions into the third dimension, with the iconic Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64, the cult classic Super Mario Sunshine for GameCube, and the outer-space adventure, Super Mario Galaxy. All three titles will come bundled together in one neat package, either digitally or on a physical cartridge. But there is one detail about this bundle that has many fans rather upset: the fact that the title will only be available for purchase from its September 18th release until the end of March 2021.
That’s right. Nintendo’s new release that will be celebrating the Italian plumber’s 35th Anniversary is a limited-run game. The title will only be on store shelves for six months, meaning that once the copies are gone, they’re gone for good. One has to wonder why Nintendo would do this with its most popular product, and one big comparison that many fans are currently drawing from is the Disney Vault.
Walt Disney Studios has artificially limited the supply of its many animated classics for decades, with films being unobtainable for years by staying within the “Disney Vault” in order to retain their monetary value over time. Nintendo is another company whose products tend to retain their monetary value over time, with many old titles from the Nintendo 64, GameCube, and Wii games staying at or even above market value. Many Nintendo games that eventually do get re-releases down the road often are sold separately at full price, instead of getting bundled together like many collections on PlayStation and Xbox systems.
Even modern titles on Nintendo’s current console, the Switch, have barely fallen in price in its three years on the market. The Switch’s launch title, The Legend of Zelda: Breathe of the Wild, continues to sell for $50 on Amazon, only $10 less than its launching price. Compared to PlayStation and Xbox-exclusive titles that launched at around the same time, the Switch’s titles certainly hold their market value much better. Other Nintendo products — like the NES Classic and SNES Classic plug-in-play systems — skyrocketed in price after their limited runs, and are now ridiculously expensive.
Nintendo is not foreign to limited releases, but this product’s limited release is perhaps one extra step towards the “Disney Vault”-like system. Who knows; perhaps this is just a one-time thing, or maybe there’ll be more Nintendo classic collections to receive the same limited release treatment. Regardless, this collection is likely to garner quite good sales, with Nintendo’s 2020 release schedule looking rather light on content. This collection is sitting as one of the only big releases left in the year, with Pikmin 3 Deluxe — another re-release that’s also garnering a bit of controversy — coming later in October. But fans will just have to wait and see how the rest of Nintendo’s year pans out.
Super Mario 3D All-Stars will be available exclusively for the Nintendo Switch from September 18th until the end of March 2021.
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