2010 marks the 25th anniversary for Nintendo’s iconic Super Mario Bros. Technically Mario was born much earlier and featured in games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., which is not a side-scrolling platformer like its famous successor.

To mark this joyous occasion for one of the most successful and beloved game franchise, Nintendo has naturally lined up a whole lot of goodies for their fans.

A repackaged Super Mario All-Stars box set has been released earlier in Japan. This will hit shelves in English markets on 3rd December. The most interesting part of this box set is that it features a History of Mario book which include initial design blueprints for the 1985 original.

Now, would this be translated into English?

According to to the book, and confirmed by Shigeru Miyamoto during a recent interview with Japan’s Fumitsu magazine, the world renowned plumber was actually supposed to be a gun-wielding badass. In the initial concept, Mario held a beam gun from which he can shoot bullets with. The original control scheme has the jump button mapped onto the “up” of the d-pad, A button for shooting and B for dashing. Miyamoto explained that this design gave way to the final gameplay control we are all now familiar with after the team felt that having a permanent gun would make Mario too invincible.

The growth effect of mushrooms was also not intended. Mario was supposed to be in the “bigger” form from start to finish. However, testers have complained that the size of Mario and the relatively small size of the environment made it hard to see what is ahead of them. The team originally suggested minimizing Mario, but Miyamoto was not keen because he felt Mario was already too small. Then in a moment of sheer design genius, the team came up with the idea of making Mario small initially and then grow bigger with a power up. The rest as we know is history.

There are plenty more details inside the History of Mario book. If you are a big fan of the fat plumber, do yourself a favor and pick up the Super Mario All-Star box set.

Nintendo will also be releasing special 25th anniversary editions of the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DSi featuring these consoles in RED~! I have to say while I am not that excited about the DSi, especially since the 3DS will be out in another 6 months or so, the red Wii is simply hot! It is definitely more gorgeous than the slick black version of the system.

Yay~! Red Hot~!

Come March 2010, this will officially become a classic.

As excited as I am with these cool looking consoles, I just can’t help but to feel a little bit irritated with all these special editions consoles. I agree they work well for fanboys, but come on, I only need one console to play games, stop tempting me to buy more systems and making me choose between the different editions.

Red or white, red or white, red or white…