The New Super Mario Bros Could Help Spur Game Sales for Wii Console

By George Thiruva
Screenshot from the New Super Mario Bros Wii Game

Screenshot from the New Super Mario Bros Wii Game

“New Super Mario Bros. Wii” came out this week. We’re not going to review the game here, except to say that it’s awesomely nostalgic! It has the 2D look of the original 25 Year old Nintendo Entertainment System game – and thankfully it also has a lot of the original’s music and sound effects.

The game is already a smash hit. And it’ll perhaps be the Wii’s biggest standalone game yet. ‘Standalone’ is the key word. While the Wii console itself has been an unimaginable success – in the faces of Sony’s Playstation 3 processing powerhouse and the XBOX 360 – it’s luster hasn’t rubbed off on game sales. Too many purchasers (for game makers’ tastes) have been purchasing the Wii to use for dedicated purposes – usually for exercise.

The Wii, with it’s athletics required motion controller, opened up the game market to folks that otherwise never would have bought a game console. Initially that was a thought to be a good thing. But it turns out many of those new gamers didn’t buy many additional games. They were buying the console to either play the included Wii Sports game, or later to play Wii Fit.

But now the nostalgia stoking Super Mario Bros are back in their original glory (Sure, there was Super Paper Mario and other games with the characters in them, but weren’t quite enough to jog 25 year old memories). It’s 90% old school gaming and 10% new. That 10% is just enough to introduce Wii users to the concept that the motion controller isn’t just for sports games. And it might just pique their interests in trying out other Wii games like the under-loved Rabbids series.