Report: Nintendo to release several remastered Mario games this year

Nintendo is apparently going to celebrate the 35th anniversary of its most beloved character by releasing multiple Mario classics on the Switch, including Super Mario Sunshine, which hasn’t been available since the GameCube days. And it couldn’t come at a better time.

Insiders apparently leaked the details to both Eurogamer and VGC. The games won’t just be released on the Switch — they’ll evidently be remastered as well. The games in question include not only the aforementioned Sunshine — which I can’t wait to play, as I never played the original — but Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy. Nintendo was reportedly going to reveal this in a splashy E3 event, but now that E3’s gone the way of so many events in the time of coronavirus, we don’t know when it’ll release the details.

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Frankly, while gaming this year has been decent so far, the rest of the world feels like it’s going to hell in handbasket. I could use some more guileless Nintendo platformers, and there are none better than the Mario games. So while a company releasing a bunch of remastered games and calling it an “event” would ordinarily activate my cynicism mode, under the circumstances I’ll take all the pure Nintendo loveliness I can get.

This is also a great boon for the Switch, which seems to receive ports of classic games slowly, if at all. I can think of a handful of Zelda games that would probably be great on the Switch but have thus far not been released on the console. While the lack of them is definitely not hurting the Switch’s sales, accruing some nostalgia sales while introducing a new generation of gamers to the classics could only be a good thing.

Nintendo will also honor Mario by releasing some new games, including a new entry in the Paper Mario series . . . and at this point the world “Mario” has lost all meaning for me. We don’t yet know when all of this will start, though if Nintendo still intends to stick to its E3 timing, we’ll probably hear news around June.