Nintendo is bringing back the Super Nintendo just in time for the holidays
Nintendo (NTDOY) is bringing is bringing the Super Nintendo Entertainment System back from the dead just in time for the holiday shopping season in the form of its SNES Classic Edition.
Available Sept. 29 for $79, the SNES Classic will come loaded with 21 games including such beloved classics as “Super Mario World,” “Super Mario Kart,” “Super Metroid,” “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past,” and “Donkey Kong Country.” Nintendo says it will also include the never-before-released “Star Fox 2.”
The company will give you two wired SNES controllers in the Classic pack, as well.
Investors continue to be pleased by the company. Shares are up 2% today, and they’re up 70% since the beginning of the year.
The SNES Classic should prove to be a huge seller for Nintendo later this year. The original NES Classic was such an unexpectedly massive hit when it was released in 2016 that the company couldn’t keep up with demand.
What was supposed to be a $59 miniaturized version of the original Nintendo Entertainment System complete with 30 classic games, became one of the holiday season’s most sought after products and ended up selling for well in excess of $200 on Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY).
Whenever a store or website announced that it had new NES Classics on sale, they would sell out in no time. And now that Nintendo has discontinued the NES Classic, getting one is next to impossible unless you want to spend four times the original selling price.
Investors were certainly happy to see that Nintendo had a huge hit on its hands with the NES Classic. But the company couldn’t keep them in stock, which ate into any potential revenue Nintendo may have realized if it had enough units available for purchase.
The problem was that Nintendo didn’t realize the kind of hit it had on its hands. The NES Classic was actually built to serve as a stopgap during the 2016 holiday season, since Nintendo was preparing to sell its new Switch console in March 2017 and didn’t have a solid console offering available at the time.
This time around, though, Nintendo will have both its Switch — which is selling incredibly well — and the SNES classic available for purchase. That should provide the company with quite a boost for the 2017 holiday shopping season.
It will be important, however, for Nintendo to ensure that it makes enough SNES Classics to keep up with demand. The SNES is also one of the first consoles to introduce expansive role-playing games, which are far more involved than the kind of simpler games found on the NES Classic.
It will be interesting to see if gamers are actually looking to spend hours playing deeper games or would rather quickly hop into and out of games like “Super Mario Brothers.”
We’ll find out for sure this holiday season.
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