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Super Mario 3D All Stars is no longer available for purchase from Nintendo eShop.
Óscar Gutiérrez / CNET
On April 2, if all goes as planned, a sealed “tab” copy of the original Super Mario Bros. will break world records, becoming the most expensive video game in history.
The current highest bid is $ 372,000.
That’s an absurd amount of money, but when you consider the craziness of non-fungible tokens, maybe the potential bidder will end up with a good deal.
Non-fungible tokens, or NFT for short, have taken over the internet. They are basically certificates of authenticity for all kinds of digital products. An NFT can represent a digital work of art, a tweet, a GIF, or a audio clip of someone farts.
NFTs mean the digital difference between “owning” and simply consuming art (or tweets or memes). It’s like the difference between owning the “real” Mona Lisa and a copy of the Mona Lisa.
At least that’s what I would say if I wanted to convince anyone that NFTs only have one meaning. Because they absolutely don’t.
This baby will cost you $ 370,000.
Heritage auctions
Look, I understand. NFTs make sense because we say they do. NFTs are sold, so they exist.
In the same way that cryptocurrency (or “real” money, for that matter) makes sense because we collectively value it, NFTs are valuable because they… are? Someone Can Buy an NFT of a Homer Simpson Pepe the Frog for $ 38,000 and sell it for $ 320,000. Jack Dorsey can sell an NFT of his first tweet for $ 2.9 million. Good for them, congratulations.
But that doesn’t mean anything Actually. makes. meaning.
Which brings me back to Mario.
On Friday, an original, sealed copy of the hang tag (i.e. with the tag that leaves it hanging on a store shelf still attached) from the original Super Mario Bros. will sell for at least $ 372,000. But Thursday, Nintendo stopped the sale of another 7 month Mario game: Super Mario 3D All-Stars.
From Thursday, you can no longer buy Super Mario 3D All-Stars on the Nintendo Switch eShop. Not only that, but Nintendo will no longer be sending physical copies of the game to stores. When the last copy available in store is exhausted, that’s it. More Super Mario 3D All-Stars.
Nintendo can say that we have been warned in advance. When Super Mario 3D All-Stars released in September 2020, Nintendo made it clear that the game can only be purchased within a specific time frame that ends on March 31. According to Nintendo, the short period of availability is due to the specific purpose of the collection. : to celebrate 35 years of the Mario franchise.
“We are celebrating Mario’s 35th birthday in different ways,” said Doug Bowser, president of Nintendo of America, in an interview with Polygon. “And with some of these titles, we felt it was an opportunity to release them for a limited time.”
In other words, the game collection is a fine marketing element.
Artificial scarcity
There is a demand for Super Mario 3D All-Stars. People still want to buy it and are always ready to pay a high price. It’s not a licensing issue, it’s Nintendo’s business. The only reason the game is no longer available is because Nintendo believed it could sell more copies, create more buzz, and ultimately make more money if the collection was only available for six months.
It all sucks. It sucks because there are people out there who want to play easily accessible versions of classics like Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy, but now they can’t. Sucks because it worked: Sales of Super Mario 3D All-Stars jumped 276% week after week in the UK.
But it sucks, mostly because of how calculated he feels. This was Nintendo’s attempt to create an artificial sense of scarcity in a product that it can literally start selling again whenever it sees fit.
Yes, we knew it was going to happen. But it stays sucks – so much so that fans made it into a meme. RIP Mario.
Super Mario 3D All-Stars and NFT feel like they occupy similar points on the same spectrum. Both are driven by an artificial scarcity: one imaginary, reinforced by humans hungry for status and quick cash, the other created and enforced by a company trying to generate sales in a way that seems dishonest.
Super Mario Galaxy, perhaps the best 3D Mario ever.
Nintendo
Both feel dishonest because it’s transparent. It is forcing value on something for value. Without it, these overpriced items wouldn’t feel really valuable.
Which brings me back to Mario. The original Super Mario.
When this sealed tab copy of the original Super Mario Bros. will sell for $ 372,000 or more, it will almost certainly make headlines for many of the same reasons Jack Dorsey sold his tweet for $ 2.9 million. Because it’s ridiculous. Because it’s a huge amount of money that most of us can’t figure out.
But the difference will always seem tangible. Literally. Not only because the owner is buying something that he can hold with both hands, but because there is something more sincere about his direct connection to the story.
Rarity has not been enforced on this copy of Super Mario, like on NFTs or even Super Mario 3D All-Stars. This rarity has been won over by the ravages of time and historical significance.
This rarity is real. There is nothing cynical about it.
Nintendo can’t go back in time and make more physical copies of Super Mario Bros. But he could push that button right now and start selling Super Mario 3D All-Stars again. And maybe it should.
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