What does Nintendo have planned for Super Mario’s 40th anniversary?

September 13 is one of those big video game dates you need to store in your calendar. Not only is it my wife’s birthday (gifts welcome), it’s also the anniversary of Super Mario Bros, one of the most iconic and influential video games ever created.

This year, Mario’s anniversary is particularly notable. Because the game originally released on the Famicom on September 13, 1985, Saturday will mark the 40th anniversary of the game.

While Mario has been around for longer than this – Donkey Kong was in 1981 and Mario Bros followed in 1983 – it was Super Mario Bros that truly cemented Mario as one of the industry’s most beloved characters. There’s a reason why, decades later, Nintendo still puts ‘Super Mario’ in the titles of its platformers.

For the 35th anniversary of Super Mario Bros five years ago, Nintendo announced and released a number of games, including Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, Paper Mario: The Origami King, and the limited-time releases Super Mario 3D All-Stars and Super Mario Bros 35.

So far this year, Nintendo’s been quiet, but with sources telling us that a Nintendo Direct is planned for mid-September, you’ve got to imagine those 40th anniversary announcements are imminent. What will Nintendo announce this time, though? Remasters? Remakes? A brand new game entirely?

Everyone has their own Mario wishlist, so here’s our list of potential announcements coming this week, along with how likely they may be. Again, to stress, these aren’t confirmation of anything – this is purely a speculative article, for a bit of fun.

A brand new 3D Mario game

Chance of an announcement this week: 2/5

Let’s start with the one most people would probably be happiest with: a brand new 3D Mario game from the same team behind Super Mario Odyssey.

As of next month, it will have been eight years since the release of Odyssey, marking the biggest ever gap between 3D Mario games by some distance (the previous record was six years between Mario 64 and Sunshine). So surely we’re due the next entry?

There are a number of reasons against the possibility of this happening. We’re only two months removed from the release of Donkey Kong Bananza, a large open-world 3D platformer, so Nintendo may not be too keen on releasing another so soon, even though, given the rest of its 2025 release schedule, we’d probably be looking at 2026 by the time it’s ready.

Nintendo also told us before Bananza’s release that it was made by “the same team that developed Super Mario Odyssey”, but didn’t give more detail on this. We’ve since learned that not all of the Odyssey team worked on the game, but that there was still “a lot” of staff crossover, as director Kazuya Takahashi puts it.

Could Nintendo’s EPD team have been working on two 3D platformers at the same time? We know that Bananza started off as a Switch game before being moved over to Switch 2, so does that mean EPD was already working on something else with Switch 2 fully in mind?

Either way, given that Odyssey ended up with an astronomical Metacritic score of 97, it would be madness to think that at least one Nintendo team somewhere hasn’t been working on a new 3D Mario platformer for some time now.

Super Mario 3D All-Stars 2

Chance of an announcement this week: 4/5

Nintendo may have received criticism for making Super Mario 3D All-Stars a time-limited release, but there can be no denying that it was an effective strategy.

By following the same sales technique Disney used to use for its VHS and DVD releases back in the day, Nintendo decided to celebrate the Super Mario series’ 35th anniversary with a limited edition release, ensuring players rushed to buy it before it was too late.

Super Mario 3D All-Stars – which consisted of HD ports of Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy – certainly didn’t suffer from the fact that it featured three of the most well-loved games in Mario’s history (even if Sunshine is a bit more love-it-or-hate-it).

Despite only being on sale for six months before it was pulled from shelves and delisted from the Switch eShop, Super Mario 3D All-Stars sold more than 9 million copies – not bad going for a trio of ports of games that had already sold in the millions.

Should it decide to pull the same trick again for Super Mario’s 40th, however, what should Nintendo do? My suggestion is Super Mario 3D All-Stars 2, another limited edition release that could bundle a much-requested game with two others, which are less frequently made available.

A lot of people bought Super Mario 3D All-Stars to get an HD version of Super Mario Galaxy, so it stands to reason that Super Mario Galaxy 2 should feature in a second compilation, bringing another 97-rated Metacritic game to the Switch library.

As for the games bundled with it, I’d like to see Super Mario 64 DS – an interesting remake of the N64 game complete with new characters and missions, which would hugely benefit from a control revamp – and the grossly underrated 3DS title Super Mario 3D Land.

Nintendo has already brought such 3DS titles as Miitopia and Luigi’s Mansion 2 to Switch, so the idea of remastering Super Mario 3D Land isn’t an entirely crazy one. It and Super Mario 64 DS may not sell a compilation on their own, but bundling them with Galaxy 2 would be a great way of getting them in more players’ hands.

The other obvious benefit is that, should a new 3D Mario game still actually be some way off, giving players three of them from Mario’s vault will give them something to keep them busy while they wait.

Super Mario Sunshine on GameCube library

Chance of an announcement this week: 4/5

The delisting of Super Mario 3D All-Stars means there’s once again no way to legally buy Super Mario Sunshine or Super Mario Galaxy on Switch (at least not a brand new copy – good old physical carts).

While the Nintendo Classics selection of Switch Online apps doesn’t yet offer Wii games, the launch of Switch 2 did bring with it the addition of a GameCube library for the first time.

So far, there are five GameCube games on the app – The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Soulcalibur 2, Super Mario Strikers, F-Zero GX, and Chibi-Robo – and Nintendo seems to be releasing them on a monthly basis.

That means it still has to announce which game is coming this month, and given that the original GameCube app announce trailer listed Super Mario Sunshine as one of the games planned for release, it would stand to reason that this should be the month it happens.

Nothing in this feature is 100% guaranteed, but if I were to put my money on the most likely announcement, it would be this.

Also, during the Nintendo Direct where the 35th Anniversary announcements were made five years ago, the SNES game Super Mario All-Stars was added to the Switch Online library immediately after the Direct ended, so I also wouldn’t bet against Sunshine being a shadow drop.

Super Mario World movie news

Chance of an announcement this week: 4/5

Love it or hate it – and for what it’s worth, I really enjoyed it – The Super Mario Bros Movie was an enormous success.

By the time the dust had settled, it had grossed $1.36 billion worldwide to become the 3rd highest-grossing animated film ever (though it’s since dropped to 5th) and the 18th highest-grossing film of all time, ahead of the likes of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Frozen and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The inevitable sequel was announced last year and is set to appear in cinemas on April 3, 2026. Although its title has yet to be confirmed, it seems all but certain to be Super Mario World.

A press release published on the NBCUniversal website in May to promote an Upfront Showcase – where it shows its upcoming releases to business partners – made reference to a number of upcoming titles including Downtown Abbey: The Grand Finale, Megan 2.0 and Super Mario World. Oops!

The title was swiftly removed from the press release, but given the Yoshi-themed teaser at the end of The Super Mario Bros movie, it makes perfect sense.

Either way, given that the first film was released on April 5, 2023, that gives us a timeframe to work with when it comes to announcements for the sequel.

The first teaser trailer for The Super Mario Bros movie was shown on October 6, 2022, during a special Nintendo Direct based entirely on the film. If there’s going to be a Nintendo Direct this week, especially one with a focus on Mario, it seems likely that we’d get either a teaser trailer for the new movie, or – at the very least – an announcement that another movie-focused Nintendo Direct is coming in the future.

Free Mario Kart World DLC

Chance of an announcement this week: 3/5

It’s now been three months since the release of Mario Kart World, and I’d imagine some players will have seen most of what it has to offer by now.

One of the things that kept players coming back to Mario Kart 8 on Wii U was the introduction of 16 bonus DLC courses. When Mario Kart 8 Deluxe came to Switch, Nintendo released six more waves of eight courses, leading to an eventual total of 96 tracks.

I don’t doubt that Mario Kart World will eventually get some sort of large paid DLC expansion – that open-world map has a lot of blank space in the corners, after all – but three months in is maybe a bit too early for something like that.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t scope for some sort of DLC for the game, however, and I think there’s one fairly obvious banana-shaped gap Nintendo could fill.

Mario has 10 outfits in the game. Luigi, Peach and Yoshi have nine. Wario has eight. Donkey Kong – the Nintendo character who’s currently the main monkey at this point in time – only has two.

If there isn’t free DLC coming to give DK a bunch of Bananza-themed outfits, then you’ve got to wonder what’s going on over there. While it would require more work, how about a new child Pauline playable character too?

Super Mario Bros 40

Chance of an announcement this week: 3/5

As part of the 35th anniversary of Super Mario Bros five years ago, Nintendo released one of the best multiplayer games it’s given us in recent years.

Super Mario Bros 35 did what Tetris 99 managed before it (and F-Zero 99 has done since) and turned a classic game into a massively multiplayer online battle.

There are few games more ‘classic’ than Super Mario Bros – hence articles like this speculating about the upcoming 40th anniversary in the first place – so messing with a sacred formula could have been like taking a crayon to the Magna Carta.

Instead, Super Mario Bros 35 was a hugely entertaining game that essentially brought the Super Mario Bros speedrunning culture to the masses and threw in other tension-building features like a countdown timer and the ability to spend coins on an item roulette.

There was no greater feeling than being seconds from elimination then getting a Starman from the roulette and ploughing through seas of enemies to top up your timer. Alas, such elation wasn’t to last.

Because limited-time releases were apparently in fashion at Nintendo that year, Super Mario Bros 35 was similar to Super Mario 3D All-Stars in that it only remained available for six months before being pulled off the eShop. The problem is, whereas 3D All-Stars can still be played to this day by those who own it, because Super Mario Bros 35 was an online game its delisting killed it dead.

The only main criticism levelled at the game was that it got a bit repetitive after a while, so not only would I like to see a theoretical Super Mario Bros 40 sticking around for a bit longer, I’d also like to see timed events that let players unlock new characters, stages or skins. Nintendo already made a wealth of 8-bit cameo characters for Super Mario Maker – bring them back and let us play as Inkling Girl to celebrate when Splatoon Raiders comes out, for example.

It’s understandable why 35 didn’t have these. Given that its closure was already guaranteed before it started, there was no point giving it the sort of special timed events that see players continuing to play Tetris 99 six years after release. Just last month, Tetris 99 got a special event that let players unlock a Donkey Kong Bananza skin, the 39th special unlockable event skin released for the game to date.

Wait a minute. 39th?

A Tetris 99 timed event

Chance of an announcement this week: 5/5

Come on. 40th anniversary? 40th special theme? Surely.