It has been awhile since I last added anything to my video game collection. This showed up on KSL last week and I knew I had to buy it. Here we have an original copy of Super Mario Brothers 3 with original box and all paperwork. I got it for the great price of $10.
This game was a huge deal when it came out. I remember not being able to find a copy during the first week of release. I seem to remember it happened to be during a trip to Vegas and I couldn’t even locate a copy there. It was probably a week or two after that I finally got it. It was a lot of fun and is still considered one of the best Mario games ever. Nintendo really went overdrive with the hype machine for this game. It was obviously covered extensively in their Nintendo Power Magazine and the commercial below, but the thing that sets this game apart is the fact it was tied in with a movie.
That movie was The Wizard with Fred Savage. The movie is pretty much one big Nintendo commercial and I ate it all up as a kid. There were two items that really stuck out. The first was the Power Glove. Everyone wanted one after the movie, so they could be “bad”. The other was the last scene of the movie at the Nintendo Championships where the last game was Super Mario 3. This scene gave the world a chance to see the game in action 6 months before it was released. It also gave away where to find one of the warp whistles. 🙂
I hope to have some SMB3 time this weekend and see if I can still finish it. Below is the original commercial and the trailer for The Wizard.