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Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. collectible pin set fiasco leaves fans upset

By Eric Halliday

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Hope you weren’t trying to get the Super Mario Bros. collectible pin set from Nintendo.

Nintendo recently started celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Super Mario Bros. game. As they looked back on the storied history of the mustachioed plumber they did something Nintendo is really good at… making questionable choices.

They released merch and some neat looking shirts. They released the Super Mario 3D All-Star game which — as I mentioned in both my regular review and my parent review — is somewhat just slapped together. But the one I thought Nintendo was going to pull off well was their Collector’s Pin set.

Let’s rewind. Nintendo used to have a My Reward program that was incredible. As you did tasks, completed surveys and made purchases, you’d use your points to “purchase” prizes. Sometimes they were discounts on games and sometimes it would be really cool physical merch like an Animal Crossing desk calendar or a Wiimote container (that now exists in my office to hold my collection of Doctor Who Sonic Screwdrivers).

Over the years they changed things up and sort of turned it into a ghost of its former self allowing you to use the points you earned for buying Switch games to…get discounts on 3DS and Wii U games.

But recently they did something that brought back the spirit of My Nintendo when it was good. Nintendo announced a series of high-quality metal pins. Each of the five pictured an image of Mario from the game book of his first five big games. I was hyped for this as a huge Nintendo fan.

To get this pin set you had to go through a series of tests and activities. They started off simple. Visit a website. Listen to a song. Complete a quiz. And they ended with things like “complete a task in the Mario Kart app game” and ultimately “purchase Super Mario 3D All-Stars.”

It was all fairly easy and after I completed it I just waited because as you can see from the Mario Kart description I had a few days left because, at the time of writing this, it is currently Sept 26th so, according to the fine print I had a ways to go before I can request the pins.

So imagine my surprise today when I found out that Nintendo announced they had given out all the pins already and thanked people for the overwhelming request for the pins.

I thought I was losing my mind and checked the contest page to see this message that the prize was no longer available.

Hold on. It’s Sept 26th. Computer, can you bring up the image of the Mario Kart fine print, please? Okay. Good good. Oh, there it is. Enhance. Enhance… THERE.

Luckily, I had kept a tab up with the store link so when the 29th hit I could just go and order it so let me just refresh that tab really quick so I can…

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So what happened? Apparently, despite the fine print for Mario Kart saying you wouldn’t receive credit until the 29th and the tasks asking you to purchase Super Mario 3D All-Stars said it may take until the end of the month to register, they apparently, without notification, gave out the pins on the 21st. And the majority of the people that got it were… can you guess?

Yup. Those same miserable bot resellers that were responsible for all the Switches being sold out as they get in stock all pandemic. This is why if you or I want these pins now we’d have to go to eBay where they’re being sold for around $100 by miserable monsters of human beings.

Real cool, Nintendo.

Obviously, I’m not the only one upset as I didn’t even realize it until I saw Mario Pins trending on Twitter and thought there was just an exciting update only to realize that the internet was collectively howling in frustration. Real cool Nintendo. You presented a pin and then used it to put the tail on the donkeys.

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