Super Mario All-Stars

About Super Mario All-Stars

Super Mario All-Stars (1993) is Nintendo's SNES compilation remaking the first four Super Mario games with 16-bit graphics, new music and save files, and the first Western release of The Lost Levels.

Super Mario All-Stars in Depth

The compilation contains faithful remakes of Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3, with their original premises and level designs intact, plus a two-player bonus game based on Mario Bros. reached from Super Mario Bros. 3. As in the originals, players guide Mario and Luigi through themed worlds, jumping between platforms, avoiding enemies and obstacles, finding secrets such as warp zones and vines, and collecting power-ups like the mushroom and the Invincibility Star. Three of the games are about rescuing Princess Toadstool from Bowser by stomping enemies and breaking bricks.

Super Mario Bros. 2 has a different story and style: Mario, Luigi, the Princess and Toad must defeat King Wart, who has cursed the land of dreams, by throwing vegetables and other objects, with the player choosing a character at the start of each life. The remakes add updated graphics, including parallax scrolling, new arrangements of the music, modified physics, the ability to save progress and bug fixes. Their designs were based on Super Mario World while trying to keep the feel of the originals. Critics considered it one of the best SNES games, Electronic Gaming Monthly calling it a "masterpiece from beginning to end" and Computer and Video Games a Super Mario director's cut, though some noted its lack of innovation.

Making Super Mario All-Stars

Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development made it after finishing Super Mario Kart, when Miyamoto proposed a value pack of all the Super Mario games; assistant director Tadashi Sugiyama said the aim was to let players try The Lost Levels, which Nintendo had once judged too difficult for the West. Freed from the NES's limits, the team rebuilt the games for the SNES. Released worldwide in late 1993, it was acclaimed as a must-have, Nintendo Magazine System estimating it could entertain players for up to a year. Famitsu described it as a model for video game remakes, and it was re-released for the 25th anniversary on Wii in 2010 and the 35th on Nintendo Switch in 2020.