Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [81]
A dozen other games launched with the Game Boy Advance on June 11, 2001, a great showing. Many of them were SNES ports, with loads more (Mario Kart: Super Circuit) in the pipeline. Even if the reheated leftovers didn’t sell well, they didn’t cost much. And expectations were low: the fans only wanted to talk about the three-way Thunderdome fight between the Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube. With no challengers, the GBA was a forfeit from the horse-race perspective.
It was a great horse race for anyone with money on the filly, though. The Game Boy Advance would go on to sell over 81 million copies in its lifetime. This could be attributable to the Candy Land syndrome: Hasbro realized that the birth rate three years ago was an almost exact predictor of how many Candy Land games would be sold that year. Every toddler got one of his or her own. Same with the Game Boy series: every few years, a new generation would be getting it as a gift.
And, of course, that generation had never played any of the old Mario games: they were brand-new! Republishing existing works was standard in every other industry, but it represented a bold new chapter for Nintendo and video games. Its omnibus experiment with Super Mario Advance was now a whole new revenue stream for every developer. Super Mario World and its sequel Yoshi’s Island (the fourth and fifth Super Mario games) were rereleased as Super Mario Advance 2 and 3, beginning a which-came-first confusion rivaled only by the Narnia books being rearranged chronologically. Realizing it had forgotten its best game at a rest stop, the series doubled back and released Super Mario Bros. 3 as Super Mario Advance 4.
There were new games, of course. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga was a spiritual sequel to the Super Mario RPG/Paper Mario series. Mario & Luigi relied more on quick timing and clever gameplay than fancy graphics. Mario sticks by Luigi’s side in this game, and the two of them have combo moves critical both for fighting and for exploration. The brothers venture to the Beanbean Kingdom to fight Cackletta the witch. Bowser’s lack of villainy is explained by amnesia: he’s forgotten he’s Mario’s enemy.
The nostalgia kick continued for Nintendo with the release of the e-Reader card, a nifty device that attached into the GBA cartridge slot. It was sold with five-packs of numbered trading cards, for early games such as Excitebike, Donkey Kong, and Ice Climbers. Each card had a strip of gray that was really binary dots in black or white. Sliding all five cards through the reader booted up a game. Nintendo had essentially brought back the punch card. And a cute town-exploration game, Animal Crossing, offered players one of nineteen different NES games as rewards, including seven Mario games, to be found or traded. Players could even collect real-world e-Reader cards and import them to the Gamecube via a special cable.
The quick-and-fun game play of early Nintendo games was brought back as well, thanks to the minigame action of the Mario Party and WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ franchises. Konami, Namco, and Tecmo were among companies that followed in Nintendo’s footsteps by releasing its old-school eighties hits in collections. Other Jurassic franchises such as Pac-Man and Frogger were given 3-D reimaginings. Nintendo shoved four previous Zelda games into one Gamecube package. Madden started to add entire previous Madden games, complete with the vintage roster, as a bonus. Doom 3 came with free Doom and Doom II. Atari joysticks were sold sans Ataris: ten classic