Nintendo Celebrates 25 Years By Painting Consoles Red

Nintendo is celebrating 25 years of Super Mario with two commemorative hardware packages, a red Wii bundle and a red DSi XL bundle, both featuring Mario games to boot. The Wii also features the new Wii Plus remote, which removes the Motionplus add-on altogther (it’s now built-in).

Neither of them look too bad, and both offer excellent value. My one complaint; they both feature some of the most popular games of their respective platforms, nothing really unique for the occasion. Why not the fancy Super Mario All-Stars game like Japan is getting? Or an all-new Mario bundle of greatest hits - All-Stars 2, anyone?

I actually hoped Nintendo would offer a retro NES theme for both platforms, sort of like what they did for the GBA several years back:

NES-Style GB Advance

This is because both the Wii and DS are boxy in their design, whereas previous consoles (Gamecube - the controller anyways, and the N64) weren’t. I made this quickie design concept to show what the Wii could look like (and yes, they can sit flat like this):

While it isn’t the most eye-pleasing design, the look of the NES carries a lot of nostalgic weight, something that would have been ideal for this 25th anniversary.

Silver would also have been ideal to commemorate 25 years (the silver anniversary), but the DS has already released many SKU’s in that color. A silver Wii would still be nice, but you might have to wait a long time, as North America just got it’s second Wii color - black - this past summer after having only the white one for the Wii’s first four years in existence.

Still, these are better than nothing, and 25 years of Mario is a huge deal in the gaming industry. Congrats Nintendo, here is to another 25 years!