"He's back, he's here, he's Mario; no, it's the new and improved Mario in Super Mario All-Stars, so much Mario it's a Mario smorgasbord. It's all the way-out Mario Bros. adventures you’ve ever played and then some, but this is juiced-up-16-bit-only-on-the-Super-Nintendo-Entertainment-System Mario, so it's bigger Mario, better Mario, in-your-face Mario; it's Raccoon Mario, Mario throwing fireballs, Mario hurling turnips, Mario negotiating an arms deal — okay, maybe not. It's Mario like you've never seen him, what's 2+2, Mario, what's the capitol of Ohio, Mario. You're gonna live, breathe, eat, sleep Mario in Super Mario All-Stars; 4 complete games including the never-seen Lost Levels, you can’t get more Mario than this, which is why The Best Play Here."
1993’s Super Mario All-Stars note , for the SNES, is a hybrid Compilation Re-release/Video Game Remake of the four mainline NES Mario games; Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario Bros. 3. For players outside Japan, this was the first chance to play The Lost Levels, which was a Family Computer Disk System exclusive.
Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World (1994) has those four games and Super Mario World. As World is already a SNES game, this version only adds a few tweaks, particularly new sprites for Luigi. It was not released in Japan, and was only available in western regions bundled with the console as the Super NES Mario set.
For those players who missed the NES era, Super Mario All-Stars became their introduction to the four classic games, now updated with 16-bit graphics and sound. It is not for purist players, but the gameplay remains almost exactly as in the original games. Elements of the Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3 remakes were later used to create the first and last entries in the Super Mario Advance series of remakes.
For 2010, Nintendo released Super Mario All-Stars again, as a Wii disc, to mark the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. (1985). This version uses emulation to run the SNES game in the Wii. To justify this as a Wii disc and not a Virtual Console download, Nintendo put a few Feelies in the boxed set. This one is playable with just the Wii Remote, though the option to play with a Classic Controller or Nintendo GameCube controller is available. Afterwards, for the 35th anniversary, the game was made available for the Nintendo Switch Online service on September 3, 2020.
In 2020, for Super Mario Bros.'s 35th anniversary, Nintendo released Super Mario 3D All-Stars, a similar collection for the 3D Mario games comprised of Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy for the Nintendo Switch. Unlike All-Stars, however, 3D All-Stars is a more traditional Compilation Re-release with the games remaining mostly unchanged from their original counterparts (outside of a few minor changes to account for the change in consoles such as being able to play Galaxy both with its original control scheme using Joy-Cons or a more traditional one using the Switch Pro Controller, updated HD textures, and Sunshine being in 16:9 widescreen for the first time).
This game provides examples of:
- Adaptational Early Appearance: In this compilation's version of Super Mario Bros. 3, the king of World 7 is turned into a Yoshi instead of a Piranha Plant, even though Yoshi historically appeared first in Super Mario World.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- To prevent one player from just hogging the game forever, Super Mario Bros. in a 2-player game now rotates players upon completing a stage, not just after either player's death.
- The Lost Levels has some of the hidden coin boxes removed, and makes unlocking World A through D much easier. Instead of beating the game eight times (adding one star per playthrough to the title screen), you just have to beat it once. While World 9 still requires the player to avoid warps, the fact that the game saves the progress of every level means the game doesn't have to be beaten in one session.
- The looping "maze" castles in Super Mario Bros. and The Lost Levels now include a chime that plays when you've chosen the correct path and a low buzz when you choose the wrong one.
- If you get game over in The Lost Levels, instead of kicking you to the first level of the world, you get to restart on the level where the game over occurred.
- All four games now have a save feature that they didn't have in the NES versions. Lost Levels takes this further by giving you the option to choose which level to continue with instead of which world.
Maybe that's for a good reason. - Super Mario Bros. 2, on top of having unlimited continues compared to the original, also gives you the option of letting you choose a new character whenever you lose a life.
- The save feature in Super Mario Bros. 3 also saves all of your reserve items.
- The Artifact: This version of Super Mario Bros. 3 shows both brothers conspicuously without their iconic gloves for their sprites. For the original 8-bit design, as with other 8-bit games, it was excused due to the console's then palette limitation. Here, the SMAS version seemed to have an oversight despite that the game now ran a stronger engine for more details as shown with the other games of this collection.note
- Audience Murmurs: The title screen has this before the lights kick on, revealing the Mario cast.
- Back That Light Up: Most titles account for the original Super Mario Bros. 2 GBA's lack of a backlight. The middle and bottom rows of this image
◊ depict the specific palette shift involved from SNES to GBA. - Battle Theme Music: Besides remixing the boss themes in Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3, All-Stars introduced a new theme for the standard Bowser battles in Super Mario Bros. and The Lost Levels, plus another for the final battle. The original games (FC/NES & FDS) had no battle theme and instead kept playing the castle theme.
- Bootstrapped Theme: The original Super Mario Bros.' underwater theme briefly became this for the series as a whole as evident in it being the title screen music for the four games within this compilation, as well as in all four Super Mario Advance remakes, as the song used on the title screen seen before the games' original title screen.
- Bowdlerise: The audience chatter on the title screen was changed in the English versions. If you listen closely to the audience chatter in the Japanese version, a male voice can be heard saying "One more beer, please!". This was altered to comply with Nintendo of America's censorship policies on references to alcohol.
- Built with LEGO: The boss stages in the All-Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 2 all appear to be made from red, green, and blue blocks resembling LEGO bricks. They're actually made out of N&B Blocks, a toy Nintendo produced in the 60s to compete with LEGO.
- Cap: All-Stars kept the cap of 128 lives in Super Mario Bros. and The Lost Levels, but fixes some glitches. The counter can now properly display the numbers 10 and above, and can no longer overflow into negative numbers.
- Color-Coded Multiplayer: The compilation gave Mario and Luigi different sprites in all of the remakes. In the version of All-Stars that included Super Mario World, Luigi got a new sprite in that game as well. Some of his actions had to be animated differently in order to keep his hit box intact (for example, he slides on his knees).
- Compilation Re-release: Four NES games (and, in the SMAS+SMW rerelease, an SNES game) in one SNES cartridge.
- Continuity Nod: Mario wears red overalls in Super Mario Bros. 1. It is quite easy to forget that his and Luigi's shirt and overalls colors switched early on, although most people can confuse the two anyways. Curiously however, Luigi now wears a green variant of this rarely seen in official media — his old-schooled white-green clothes are now his fire power colors.
- Copy Protection: If All-Stars detects an illegal copy, it displays a warning message and refuses to start. A dirty cartridge might trigger the message, but modern SNES emulators do not trigger it unless you force them to.
- Deliberately Monochrome: Inverted for World 6-3 in the original game, 7-3 and C-3 in The Lost Levels, and World 9-3 of Super Mario Bros. 3. They were originally monochrome in the NES versions, but recolored in this compilation.
- Digitized Sprites: The game selection screen shows the box art for the games this way. Because no action is going on other than panning or opening up a dialog box, the system was able to show the pictures at relatively high quality for the SNES. 3D All-Stars does this as well. Not only do the included games have their box art, but the soundtracks have the album covers as their icons.
- Divergent Character Evolution: All-Stars added new sprites for Luigi, who is no longer a Palette Swap of Mario, even outside of Super Mario Bros. 2. SMAS+SMW also added new sprites for Luigi in World.
- Dramatic Thunder: Booming thunder was added to the final castles in both Super Mario Bros and The Lost Levels. You can see and hear the lightning flashes through the windows in the level background. Thunder and lighting flashes where also added to airship levels in Super Mario Bros 3.
- Early-Bird Cameo: The king of World 7 in Super Mario Bros. 3 has been turned into a Yoshi. The sprite is a saturated version of what would be used in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island.
- Forest of Perpetual Autumn: The background of 8-2 in both Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels has an autumn-based foliage, mixing shades of green, red and orange. This contrasts the graphical design of the original games' version, where it was indistinguishable from most other levels.
- Game-Breaking Bug: Normally in the NES version if a flag and a castle is applied in "World 8-4" via level editing, the "World 8-5" would load normally as a underwater world 3-4. Converting the edited NES ROM into SNES and doing the same thing, the screen gets messed up when trying to load that next level unless if editing the said world by applying a reverse L pipe and setting the position to "V=10, V=15 (walking)" in smbutil program so Mario automatically enters the pipe from the final level and the next level loads without messing the screen and using the castle background. If Mario dies in that level and the proceeding levels post "World 8", the screen will mess up. Unlike NES version, the game crashes when proceeding "World 8-5" unless if editing World 3-4 by doing the same thing as the former which Mario enters in underwater versions of "World 6-2" and "World 1-4" famously known as "World 9" with weird floor with Ground Theme in the former and in the latter world the game crashes when proceeding unlike NES version.
- George Lucas Altered Version: In addition to dramatic across-the-board graphical improvements, All-Stars also made a number of small edits to the NES games, usually to eliminate the possibility of glitches, bugs, accidental dead ends, and the like that were present in the original games. For Super Mario Bros. 3, this often involved small adjustments to the placement of pipes and blocks.
- Goomba Stomp:
- The enemies in the Battle Mode of Super Mario Bros 3 must be dispatched by toppling them from underneath and then kicking them when toppled as in the original Mario Bros....except for the Koopa enemy. This is not the original Shellcreeper that have since been replaced by Spinies; this enemy has the distinction of being the only enemy in the Battle Mode game that can be jumped on as per tradition for modern Koopas, whose shell can be used as a projectile against other enemies (or the other player).
- In the same game mode, one player can stun the other by jumping on their head.
- Japanese Ranguage: Like in the NES version of Super Mario Bros. 2, the enemy Clawgrip was mistranslated as Clawglip. This error was finally fixed in the GBA version (Super Mario Advance).
- Level 1 Music Represents: The compilation gives each game their own title themes, and they're all based on the underwater theme of the original game. In order, here are the All-Stars themes for the original Super Mario, Lost Levels and 3 (the title screen of 2 already had this theme in the NES, which still holds true here).
- Meaningless Lives: Extra lives are especially pointless in the All-Stars version of The Lost Levels, which saves at every level rather than every world.
- Minus World: Averted. All-Stars fixed some glitches, including being able to access "World -1" in Super Mario Bros. You can still clip through the wall, but the pipes will just take you to the Worlds they were intended to take you.
- Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo: The Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 is given the subtitle For Super Players for this version, which is the slogan in its Disk System box art. Since there was already a Super Mario Bros. 2 internationally, those versions changed the game's title to Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. In both cases, this means that Super Mario Bros. 3 is the fourth game in the collection.
- Permanently Missable Content: In The Lost Levels, your save file is permanently locked out of World 9 if you used a Warp Zone prior to when you would start World 9, even if you warped backwards. Not only that, but if you ever use a warp zone after getting World 9, you retroactively lose it for that save file. If you're unfortunate enough to save, that is.
- Poison Mushroom: In the original Disk System version of The Lost Levels, the Poison Mushroom was just a Palette Swap of a Super Mushroom, with almost the same colors. The All-Stars version made the Poison Mushrooms a completely and totally unmistakable solid purple with a skull on the cap of the mushroom and gave them angry eyes. If you still picked one of these up, you deserved it.
- Save-Game Limits: All-Stars has a save feature, which the NES games originally lacked. Players no longer need to beat the game in one playing. The limit is that it only saves the current world, or level for The Lost Levels. Fortunately, Super Mario Bros. 3 keeps track of completed fortresses (and thus the shortcuts they unlock) and reserve power-ups. 3D All-Stars, on the other hand, didn't alter this at all: Save files work exactly as they did in the original releases, as they presented no issues whatsoever to begin with.
- Smooch of Victory: Peach gives Mario or Luigi a kiss in his left cheek after being saved at the end of the original game and The Lost Levels. This didn't happen in their original (FC/NES & FDS) versions.
- Sound Test: 3D All-Stars lets players listen to the games' soundtracks through the menu. It also includes the bonus tracks that were initially only available on the Japanese exclusive soundtrack CDs. They can also be listened to while the console is in sleep mode if something is plugged in to the headphone jack.
- Splash of Color: In their original NES versions, World 6-3 in of Super Mario Bros., World 7-3 and C-3 of The Lost Levels and World 8-3 of Super Mario Bros. 3 are completely monochrome except for Mario or Luigi's sprite. The remakes in this compilation redesign the levels to more closely resemble the other overworld levels in their respective games.
- Steel Drums and Sunshine: The swingy overworld theme from Super Mario Bros. 3 is remixed to have steel drums play the melody.
- Story Overwrite: In the remake of Super Mario Bros., if Mario/Luigi defeated Bowser while small, then a Super Mushroom will fall on top of him, causing him to grow, before the ending starts. As a result, Mario/Luigi will always start "hard mode" (where all Goombas are replaced by Buzzy Beetles, all other enemies move faster, and there are now more enemies in the game) in his Super form, and as a result the SNES remake marks the only time he will get a Fire Flower in the first power-up block, since you can't return to said block after passing it.
- Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: The Lost Levels lets you save on a per-level basis instead of having to start from the beginning of the world when you reload. It also so happens that it is the hardest game in the pack.
- Video Game Remake: Of the four classic Super Mario Bros. games released on the NES, now with SNES graphics and sound.
- V-Sign: The Mario Bros. now do this in Super Mario Bros. and The Lost Levels when entering a pipe, or before entering a castle. The box art for The Lost Levels on the game selection screen also shows Mario doing this.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: The Trope Namer naturally shows up in Super Mario Bros. and The Lost Levels. This time, there's an animation where the mushroom retainer comes out of a bag. The number of mushroom retainers coming out depends on what number the World is (1 for World 1, up to 7 for World 7).
