Nintendo has now repackaged and gussied up SMB3 for its GBA release as Super Mario Advance 4, updating the graphics and throwing in a few bonuses. had staked out, and it created the single largest, most fully-realized Mario world that had been seen up to that point. It delivered interesting new tweaks to the fundamental platformer formula that the original Super Mario Bros. The hype may have been manufactured, but it turned out the game more than deserved it. 3, which not only packed a strong print and television campaign in the US, but had the promotional help of The Wizard, a video-game-themed motion picture that promised frothing young gamers a peek at the next installment in Nintendo's masthead series, before its release.
But that all changed with Super Mario Bros. For most of the 1980s, there really wasn't such a thing as 'prerelease hype' in the video game industry.
