But that's really nothing new. All this new All-Stars edition is doing is continuing a trend Nintendo first got going around 25 years ago and has revisited countless times in the decades since -- the fine art of repackaging existing products. Nintendo's been repackaging and remarketing its classic games through collections, compilations, ports and remakes almost since Day 1 of becoming a console publisher here in America.
And some of those reissues have been a bit suspect.
So let's take a journey back through the generations and reflect on the highs and lows of Nintendo, its legendary video games, and the sometimes less-than-legendary ways they've been sent back out to market again, and again, and again.
The Two-in-Ones
Super Mario All-Stars is probably the compilation package most people think of right off the bat when it comes to Nintendo's collections of classics, but the Big N got started with the idea of putting more than one game on the same cartridge well before the SNES age. It was fairly early on with the NES, actually, and chances are it was you or a friend's introduction to Nintendo gaming in the first place -- the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt two-in-one cartridge.
Shipping as a pack-in with the NES "Action Set" hardware bundle that also included two controllers, the Zapper and the system itself, Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt was so prolific that many longtime Nintendo fans never even saw those two titles on individual cartridges. The games weren't altered in any way, with no upgrades or changes made beyond the basic game select screen placed at the beginning to choose between one or the other. But it was a first step into repackaging, for both promotional and cost-cutting reasons.
Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt weren't the only pairing placed in one piece of plastic this way, though. The Action Set's success prompted other versions later on, like a three-in-one edition that tossed World Class Track Meet in as well to promote the giant foot-powered Power Pad peripheral; Super Spike V'Ball/World Cup Soccer, a sports combo meant to endorse the four-player adapters for the NES; and Donkey Kong Classics, which featured the NES ports of both Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. smashed into one box.
The Player's Choice
Of course, Nintendo's repackaging of its older titles hasn't always meant them getting compiled together with other games on collection cartridges. Sometimes the games have just been sent back out to stores as-is inside, with a fresh coat of paint, new sticker or fresh, eye-catching banner graphic applied to the box.
This trend also got going in the NES era, though later on -- as the system first went on sale in 1985 and stayed active in the marketplace until the mid-'90s, there were lots of late adopters of the hardware who missed out on some of the early million-sellers. Nintendo capitalized on that by selecting four games to re-release -- The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Metroid and Punch-Out!!.
Each one was changed from its original edition. The Zelda games lost their luster, as their original shipments had gone out with gold-colored cartridges and the reissues simply shipped in standard grey. Metroid got an artwork makeover, as the pixel-art Samus from its original box was replaced by promotional art of the bounty hunter from her Game Boy sequel, Metroid II. And Punch-Out!!'s change you're probably familiar with -- Nintendo altered it, packaging and game both, to remove any references to the defamed Mike Tyson. This small cycle of four game re-releases could be seen as the precursor to the "Player's Choice" lines that have followed for nearly every other Nintendo platform since.
The Remastering Begins
Turning the page into the 16-bit era now, we come to the point when Super Mario All-Stars was originally released as a Super Nintendo cartridge. This was a shift for Nintendo's marketers. They'd repackaged multiple games together before -- we've just established that. But this was the first time the games in question had been revisited, reprogrammed and remastered. All-Stars was then what a Special Edition DVD or Blu-ray release is like today, and the Mario fans of 1993 were blown away by the updated visuals applied to our favorite adventures.
It didn't stop at just All-Stars, though. Its success spurred Nintendo on to do more, and the game of re-releases was re-released a little bit later on with another new addition -- Super Mario World. The updated All-Stars edition that jammed World onto the cart alongside the remakes of Mario 1, 2, 3 and the Lost Levels was used only as a hardware bundle pack-in game, and those late adopters of the SNES who got it were privileged to discover that the included version of World was updated. It included new art and controls for Luigi, making him visually distinct from his brother and giving him his signature leg-kicking floaty jump from Super Mario Bros. 2. (The just-released Wii version of All-Stars doesn't include World at all, sadly.)
Nintendo then rounded out the 16-bit age with one last notable compilation cartridge, Tetris & Dr. Mario. It was, at first, exactly what its title suggests -- a game including both of the classic puzzlers. The thing that made it stand apart, though, was Nintendo went the extra mile and actually devised a new gameplay mode that fused the two together. You'd go head-to-head against a friend in a round of Tetris, then the first person to complete enough lines would see their side of the screen shift to Dr. Mario, then it would bounce back to Tetris after you eliminated enough viruses. Pretty amazing stuff for puzzler players in the mid-'90s.
Breathing New Life into Old
The process of going back into all of those Mario games and puzzlers and updating their designs and graphics must have been time-consuming, so it's understandable that Nintendo didn't revisit absolutely all of their older games for updated editions on the SNES. That 16-bit platform was where we saw another Nintendo strategy for breathing new life into old games appear, though -- with the Super Game Boy adapter.
Nintendo's original Game Boy was not too pretty to look at, with its monochrome, dimly-lit display screen that left everything on it tinged with green. The Super Game Boy brought a much needed splash of color to those bleak graphics, serving as a go-between cartridge that let you plug portable Game Boy games into your SNES and play them, in color, up on your television screen. The new adapter allowed Nintendo to begin to remarket many Game Boy titles in a new way, pairing up promotion of the peripheral with fresh repackagings of the biggest GB hits with new award-ribbon graphics on their boxes.
The Super Game Boy's success then spun back into more in-depth remasterings of certain titles, as games like The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and Wario Land II got "DX" editions that added new content and colorization for the Game Boy Color hardware a few years later. Then, later still, Nintendo repeated the success by offering the Game Boy Player adapter that offered the same portable-games-on-the-big-screen functionality to the GameCube, focusing on the Game Boy Advance library.
When Everything "Advanced"
Speaking of the Game Boy Advance, that portable more than any other platform might take the crown for Nintendo repackaging efforts -- tons of its library, especially early on, was comprised of classics given fresh facelifts and made to be playable on the go. Nintendo got things going on Day 1, offering Super Mario Advance as a launch title for the handheld -- and, instead of being a unique new game, it was simply a new update to the already-updated version of Super Mario Bros. 2 that appeared in Super Mario All-Stars.
It was kind of the reverse of the company's thinking on the SNES, actually. Whereas All-Stars' big appeal was getting a bunch of games together on one cartridge, the Game Boy Advance library chopped those same titles back up into individual releases. Super Mario Advance 2 brought back Super Mario World, again, Super Mario Advance 3 repackaged the SNES hit Yoshi's Island and the fourth release was the ridiculously named Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3.
But it wasn't just Mario getting repackaged on GBA. No, Link got it too with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past & Four Swords; the company dipped way back into its past to remake and remarket a bunch of its old Game & Watch LCD games with the Game & Watch Gallery series; and as the portable was aging in 2004 Nintendo decided to arbitrarily and half-heartedly pay homage to the NES with the NES Classic Series, repackaging a bunch of 8-bit games for portable consumption. That's got to be the repackaging low point for Nintendo. The games were squashed to fit on the lower resolution GBA screen, making them look terrible, and you could just tell Nintendo of America really didn't care that much about the whole "event." They even released a Famicom-colored GBA here in America. Where the Famicom was never sold. Yeah.
Getting Carded
Ah, yes. The e-Reader. Maybe the most infamous of all of Nintendo's repackaging and remarketing strategies from over the years, and certainly the most cumbersome. Nintendo's e-Reader was a bulky peripheral that plugged into the cartridge slot of a Game Boy Advance and gave the gamers of 2002 the power to play Nintendo's newest round of reissued games, shipping not on cartridges, or discs, but on playing cards.
Sets of physical trading cards were sold in little packages like packs of Topps baseball cards or Magic: The Gathering boosters, and if you scanned a strip of dots printed on each card through the e-Reader's slot you could send small chunks of data into your GBA. The functionality was used for small things like adding extra levels to Super Mario Advance 4 and extra trainers to battle in Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire, but Nintendo also sent several of its old NES games back out the door, once again, in card form.
Only the smallest ones, though. Because the e-Reader could only process small amounts of data a time, you couldn't get complex titles like Kirby's Adventure. It was only early, simple stuff like Donkey Kong Jr., Pinball and Balloon Fight. And, like the NES Classic Series that would follow after these releases, they were graphically compromised. Even missing some features, like any multiplayer modes they might have once held. A gimmicky peripheral at best, once again supported by repackaging the classics.
As Bonus Content
That same era of the early '00 decade, in addition to seeing the release of repackagings like the Game Boy Advance Classic NES Series and the e-Reader games, also had a third reissuing for many of the same early NES titles -- you could find and unlock them in Animal Crossing. It was yet another new strategy for Nintendo in presenting its same back catalog classics for consumption again, but this time they weren't sold individually -- they were placed inside a new, unrelated game concept to help sell it. You'd get a free NES game to play inside the Animal Crossing world right when you started your game (if you bought a new copy with Nintendo's special Memory Card), and you could find many more throughout the course of becoming a part of virtual animal society.
Nintendo had taken steps toward this strategy late in the Nintendo 64's life cycle, with two other occasions of old games being hidden within new ones. You could find and unlock an emulation of the NES Excitebike inside Excitebike 64, which helped to draw attention back to that franchise after it had been dormant for 15 years. And you could come across the original Donkey Kong inside Donkey Kong 64, where playing and completing a level of the old game was actually integrated into the progression of the new adventure.
But Nintendo probably got this particular type of repackaging most right when it offered some of the best pre-ordering and company loyalty bonuses the industry's ever seen. If you put money down toward The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker in advance of its Spring 2003 release, you could get The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time/Master Quest, a GameCube disc that included an emulation of the N64 masterpiece alongside a new remixed version of the adventure. Then, after Wind Waker came out, Nintendo produced a rare and now much sought-after second bonus Zelda disc that was essentially a "Zelda All-Stars." Called The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition, it combined Zelda 1, Zelda 2, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask all on one GameCube disc and could only be obtained by registering games with Nintendo, subscribing to Nintendo Power or buying a specific GameCube hardware bundle. Or tracking one down on eBay, I suppose.
Some Small Consolation
When the Wii was launched just over four years ago, Nintendo took its first tentative steps into digital game sales. With what? Its classic games, of course.
Having repackaged, rebranded and remarketed many of the same games over and over again in actual, tangible brick and mortar stores, the Big N finally found another avenue of distribution through its digital Wii Shop Channel. The shop is now home to original WiiWare games and extras like the Wii's Internet Browser, but when it launched it offered only classic Nintendo games under the new "Virtual Console" banner.
The Virtual Console re-releases of games like Final Fantasy, Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario 64 have mostly been unaltered emulations of the games' original code -- no updated graphics or other All-Stars-esque amenities have been added. The overall functionality of the VC's emulator has made some of the older titles more accessible, though, with save states that let you skip messing around with outdated password systems and in-game instruction manuals accessible at any time. I guess those are the kinds of new features you get when your repackaging of a game doesn't involve an actual package.
The Express Lane
Nintendo chopped up the SNES Super Mario All-Stars to create the separate releases of the Super Mario Advance series on the GBA, but at least those carved-apart portions were still full games on their own. When the Big N launched its second digital distribution store on the DSi handheld, though, the winnowing fork got a bit more violent.
The DSiWare service launched in Spring of 2009 with an awful lot of games tagged with the subtitle "Express." And while one of those titles, Dr. Mario Express, was a new version made just for DSi, the rest were more digital repackagings of older games. But not even entire older games. Just parts of them. Pieces, separated out and made into standalone downloads from products that had shipped as complete, physical cartridges earlier in the DS life cycle.
We got three releases of Brain Age Express, piecing out that brain-training title into separate Math, Arts & Letters and Sudoku downloads. We got a trio of Clubhouse Games Express titles, taking that 42-games-in-1 package and offering only 5-game portions of it. We got a half-dozen releases of Master of Illusion Express, ridiculously trying to pass off single magic tricks as standalone downloads. And poor Electroplankton got the worst of it, as that music maker was divided into 10 different sold-separately chunks. Nintendo was once putting multiple games together in the same box, offering incredible value for the consumer. Now, it seems, we're sometimes more encouraged to buy just a fraction of one game at a time.
Where We Stand Today
And finally we arrive in the present. Here in the modern era, several years into the life cycle of both DS and Wii, we've seen even more occasions when Nintendo has dipped back into the past to repackage its games for the present.
On the Wii's physical disc side of the equation we saw the system launch with what was basically an updated edition of a GameCube game, even though the Cube version came out a month later -- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Other GameCube titles were then drawn upon and given control scheme makeovers for the New Play Control! series, which included Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, Mario Power Tennis and Pikmin shipped back to stores in white Wii boxes before that brand fizzled out. And of course we've now got Super Mario All-Stars: Limited Edition, the inspiration for our feature here today.
But I've also got to give Nintendo a bit of credit here, because for as questionable as many of these re-releases have been over the years, the company still knows how to get it right when honest effort is put into a project. Case in point there, Metroid Prime Trilogy. That's repackaging at its best, as it brought back both Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes from the GameCube, remastered each to enhance the visuals and play control, packed them together with Metroid Prime 3: Corruption in one incredibly attractive box and priced the whole thing for just 50 bucks. That's how you do it, friends.
Looking forward, we know that Nintendo is nowhere near done with repackaging its older games to sell over and over again. More remakes and reissues are on the horizon, including the wealth of 3D conversions we'll see on the upcoming 3DS headlined by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and Star Fox 64 3D at or near the launch of that system. The 3DS will also be home to a new Virtual Console, which will give several Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles from yesteryear their first encore appearance in America.
And, as time rolls on, we'll even see repackagings of games that are brand new to us today. What will they be? A Kirby compendium that gathers every adventure from Dream Land to Epic Yarn together on one Wii 2 disc? A Donkey Kong Country collection that puts the SNES trilogy on sale with the new Wii sequel, and its inevitable follow-up? A Super Mario Sunshine Express that separates that game into 120 different downloads, one for each Shine, and each one selling for five bucks apiece? Nothing much would surprise me any more, because if there's some way to repackage and resell any old game, Nintendo's definitely going to find it.
