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Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Continues Nintendo’s Tradition of Maddening Limited Editions

This article is over 6 years old and may contain outdated information

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is releasing in a panoply of packages intended to maximize the reach of Nintendoā€™s adored mash-up series. But only one of those editions will drive completionists and fanatics mad.

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Thereā€™s a regular old cartridge version for collectors and folks who want something to wrap up for a holiday gift. Players whoā€™ve abandoned physical editions can pre-load the digital edition right now, granting them an existentially torturous icon on their Switch home screen until the game officially goes on sale. Hardware bundles with Smash Bros. logos emblazoned on the Joycons include digital codes, a special edition cartridge that comes with a snazzy Pro Controller. Nintendo is going all out to ensure that Ultimate caters to every type of customer. All of them pale in comparison to the Amazon Japan-exclusive collectorā€™s edition, though.

Hidden within its austere black box are 63 Amiibo figures, nearly all of the 76 characters that make up Ulitmateā€™s absurd roster. Brand new characters like Metroidā€™s Ridley and Star Fox nemesis Wolf Oā€™Donnell will be included, but doubly tempting for collectors are Amiibo for Donkey Kongā€™s King K. Rool and Ice Climberā€™ titular characters, which wonā€™t be commercially available elsewhere until 2019. The worst part: Nintendo is only making 50 of these boxes.

Thatā€™s 50 copies of the coolest edition in a series that has sold close to 41 million copies in the past two decades.

Where most video game companies release special versions of games in ample quantities, sometimes to their detriment ā€” Iā€™m looking at you, stacks of unsold Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite box sets at GameStop ā€” Nintendo has a mystifying habit of doing infinitesimally small print runs of desirable limited editions. In the past five years alone theyā€™ve dropped a clutch of white whales for collectors to obsess over. Fire Emblem Fates, a 3DS role-playing game split into two versions, got a limited edition release bundling both games onto a single cart so rare that it jumped from $90 new to $300 or more on the secondary market, a price itā€™s stayed at since. That was nothing compared to the Wii U release of a Hyrule Warriors Limited Edition box set only available on a single morning at Nintendoā€™s store in New York, which now sells for up to $2,500. Nintendo reportedly only produced around 300 of those. Just imagine what this version of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will be going for.


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Image of Anthony John Agnello
Anthony John Agnello
Anthony John Agnello has worked full-time as a journalist and critic for over a decade with outlets like The A.V. Club, Edge Magazine, Joystiq, Engadget, and many, many others. Anthony first contributed to The Escapist in 2009, with In Defense of the Friend Code, an article about how we don't know where we're going if we don't know where we come from. How even what seems like the stupidest creation in the world comes from a human place; it's the work of one person reaching out to another.