Dear Malstrom,
Nintendo had intended Super Mario All Stars: Limited Edition to be a limited print run for the holidays. Within a matter of days of its release in December, they were sold out. I would know personally. I traveled miles and miles and checked 40 stores for a copy. The game was released on December 12th 2010. I looked for a copy on December 16th 2010. When I looked on ebay, the price of the game exceeded twice the cost of what retailers sold it for, going for as much as $90, and those were from bids, not seller set prices. That is more than the price of a brand new Xbox360 and PS3 game. Yet with all their glorious HD graphics, their games overvalued compared to a 17 year old game with 16 bit graphics. Real entertainment never phases out.
Now they are making another run of Super Mario All Stars: Limited Edition at the same price that it was being sold at. This is a sign of their evergreen strategy with games. Although I do have many speculations why they are making a rerun now. There aren’t many interesting releases being made this spring, probably the Conduit 2 and we know how that will pan out. Maybe they should have released Super Mario Galaxy 2 sometime this spring. After all, not only would Super Mario Galaxy 2 sell like hot cakes, it would sell hardware. Another outlook could be to undermine sales of games on other platforms. As it is right now on ebay, the game is selling for about $50. Still well above the MSRP. People will likely find themselves attracted to buying super mario all stars than some cinematic crap work. It could also be that they are keeping something out for the wii while Nintendo prepares to sell the 3ds to the public.
Anyways, I am looking forward to more articles.
Super Mario Collection isn’t about the evergreen strategy. There was question about how to use Super Mario All-Stars since they didn’t want to just throw it on the VC. So they burned it on a disc and declared it to be the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Brothers. But knowing that wouldn’t be enough, they threw in a disc that had some SMB songs on it.
This was a package I could easily have programmed and even assembled using materials around the house. It is not hard to make an audio disc. It is not hard to burn a SNES rom to disc with the appropriate emulation. The only tricky thing would be to get all the controllers to work appropriately for it. But that is easily done with the emulation program. This is the laziest release Nintendo has ever done.
Despite that, something curious has occurred. It sold out so fast that a usual fan, like yourself, was unable to obtain it. As a service to those fans, Nintendo is printing more.
So why did it sell out so fast? “It was the collectors buying them all up!” But the basis for collecting is the assumption that the value of the game will hold and rise over time.
How can NES games, in a recycled SNES format, sell so much?
During the 5th and 6th Generations, the ‘experts’ (who tend to lecture us from their chosen gaming message forum) said that the side scroller was ‘obsolete’ because 3d has eliminated anything for 2d. If you want 2d platformers, they said, then you must play a handheld. The remark is more of an insult. Anything 2d is instantly stigmatized as ‘handheld’ and is sent to the ‘handheld ghetto’. Why, it is not worthy of a proper home console game.
Instead of voicing our displeasure, many of us assumed that perhaps our time had passed. Perhaps the younger people only like the newly frazzled 3d games. Perhaps we were old fogies remembering games of our younger days.
But then came NSMB DS to phenomenal success. How to explain that? “It sold well because it was on a handheld, Malstrom.” Then, the expert would give me an evil stare. “Don’t you dare think, Malstrom, that there should be a home console version of Super Mario Brothers. That would be obscene!”
When Mario 5 was released, it was greeted with a strange sense of hostility by self-appointed ‘experts’. It was condemned as a ‘casual game’ (oh, that term!) Yet, it sold and sold.
But if our self-appointed ‘experts’ were having a stroke over Mario 5 (oh no! a 2d game selling extremely well!), then what is their reaction to Mario Collection selling out very fast?
What is Miyamoto’s reaction? That would be a great question for a game journalist to ask him. After all, he was responsible for more Super Mario Brothers not being made for 15-20 years.
The reason why I keep harping on 2d Mario isn’t entirely about 2d Mario. It is fantastic evidence of a discovery about the video game market:
That there is no difference between gamers today and twenty five years ago. Just as NES kids grew up with a NES and Super Mario Brothers, the same phenomenon is occurring with Wii kids growing up with Mario 5 and NSMB DS. I would say much of the DS and Wii phenomenon is replicating what we saw with the early Atari and NES days.
Why is this important? It is concrete evidence that video game phenomenons can be recreated again and again. It contradicts Nintendo’s current “surprise” dogma that every future title must be different (e.g. if you liked games like Metroid or Super Metroid [which was a remake of Metroid], too bad for you. It is time for ‘surprise’ which means bizarre stuff like Maternal Instincts Metroid).
Video game entertainment does not follow the same laws as movie entertainment or book entertainment or music entertainment. If it did, the video game business would be dominated by movie and music companies.
Instead of looking to other mediums to act as a lantern for gaming’s feet, I say we look at the decades of data that has already been trailblazed. Patterns can be detected.
I am confident in the future that the best selling blockbuster consoles will share many similarities with the Atari, NES, and Wii revolutions. I am also confident that a future Super Mario Brothers game will sell well (provided it is of quality).
And twenty five years from now, copies of Super Mario Brothers 50th Anniversary, that include ‘classics’ such as Super Mario Brothers 5, will be sold out.