Super Mario 3D All-Stars

» see nintendo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Nintendo announced Super Mario 3D All-Stars on 3 September 2020, in a Direct built around Mario's 35th anniversary, and buried the important sentence in the fine print. The collection would be sold until the end of March 2021 and then it would stop. Not a sale, not a promotion window. The digital version would leave the eShop and production of the cartridge would end on the same day.

It went on sale 18 September 2020 with Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy inside, running at higher resolutions with remapped controls and a music player bolted on. Reviews landed around 82 on Metacritic. The reviews that complained mostly complained about what was not in it: no Galaxy 2, and very little in the way of extras for a package carrying three of the most important 3D games ever shipped.

None of that mattered to the sales figure. Nintendo moved 9.01 million copies by the end of March 2021, which made it one of the best-selling games of the year on a technicality: it was only for sale during part of that year. Then on 31 March it went away, exactly as advertised, and the resale price of the cartridge started climbing that week.

Mario 64 came out in 1996, when I was twelve and living in a country where Nintendo had no real distribution. The console in Turkish homes was a PlayStation, usually a modified one, and the games came from a shop that burned them for you. The N64 was something you read about in imported magazines. So the first two of these three games were already a rumor to me before they were a rerelease, and by the time Nintendo put them in a box with a deadline on it I was in my late thirties in Ankara, reading about the deadline rather than the games.

~ the dossier ~

~ what was in the box ~

Three ports, handled lightly. Super Mario 64 got a resolution bump and kept its 1996 camera, the one that everybody had to learn to fight. Sunshine got widescreen for the first time, which meant the GameCube version's cropped framing was finally opened up, though the notorious blue-coin hunting stayed exactly as tedious as it had been in 2002. Galaxy got the largest amount of actual work: touch controls on the Switch's screen for the pointer segments, and a workable scheme for handheld mode, where the original had assumed a Wii Remote in one hand.

The music player was the tell. Nintendo included a soundtrack browser for all three games, which is the kind of feature you add when the anniversary framing is the product and the ports are the packaging.

~ the clock ~

Doug Bowser, running Nintendo of America, described the limited window as a way to "celebrate the anniversary in a unique way." Nintendo also said afterward that it did not intend to use the model widely, which reads as a company noticing the reaction. The reaction was not gratitude. Preservation-minded players pointed out that Nintendo had taken three games that were already hard to buy legally and made the legal way to buy them expire.

The counter-argument is that it worked. Scarcity moved nine million units of a collection whose individual pieces were decades old. Whether that is a celebration or an inventory strategy depends on where you were standing, and Nintendo did not pick a side in public.

~ what got buried with it ~

Super Mario Bros. 35, the battle-royale experiment, died on the same day under the same anniversary logic, which made 31 March 2021 an unusually specific date in Nintendo's history: two products killed by the calendar they launched on. The Galaxy port resurfaced in 2024 inside Super Mario 3D All-Stars' successor collection for Galaxy and Galaxy 2, so one of the three eventually got a second legal home. Mario 64 and Sunshine went back to being games you either already owned or acquired some other way.

If you bought the cartridge, you still own it and it still runs. That is the part people forget when they call this a shutdown. Nothing was switched off, no server went dark. The store just stopped, and a game that cannot be purchased at any price is a different kind of dead from a game that cannot be played.

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