Super Mario Items Coming to Animal Crossing: New Horizons - What Can We Expect?

With a 15 minute Super Mario Direct packed with celebrations, it was easy to miss over the quick glimpse that included Mario items coming to New Horizons in March 2021. A lot of items are missing in New Horizons, so this is a good start in bringing back some content. We've included all the items we expect to be included, as well as some speculation on our behalf! Full details below.

Super Mario items have been in the Animal Crossing for a long time. Animal Crossing for the GameCube allowed players to obtain then via Secret Codes, and the exclusive Doubutsu no Mori e+ port even had two early version of Public Works Projects that were Mario-themed, the Egg and Mushroom.

Wild World and City Folk allowed the players to download them through wifi, and pop them from balloon presents, respectively, and also allowed the players to buy hats, accessories, and shirts from the Able Sisters, or via redeeming Nook Points. Finally, New Leaf introduced special Fortune Cookies which would give the player a random Nintendo themed item. Even Pocket Camp has held special events that allowed players to craft certain Super Mario items.

They've been in the series for a long time, yet are seemingly missing from New Horizons, alongside the huge assortment of other Nintendo items. In March 2021, Nintendo will be releasing a number of Super Mario items into New Horizons, but exactly what they'll give us, and how they'll be obtained is currently unknown. We've put together a few theories on how they could introduce them to us!

There are four potential methods that seem most likely. Purchasing them from the Shop or Nook Stop Terminal are the more straight forward ones, but they could also reintroduce Fortune Cookies, or even a Crafting event to allow players to obtain these.

Fortune Cookies are pretty straight forward, and it could be a simple way for Nintendo to introduce other Nintendo items in future. Rather than having to develop an entire new event, they simply just have to program in new rewards to the existing Fortune Cookie pool. With Zelda's 35th anniversary coming in 2021, we also expect to see some Zelda items added to the game at some point, but that's getting a little too ahead of ourselves.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp already introduced players to the Super, 1-Up and Mega Mushroom crafting materials, and they could easily be implemented here. They could also add the Cheep Cheep as a temporary fish much like they did in Pocket Camp. Since a lot of events have focused on crafting, we wouldn't be surprised if they went with this route - our only concern would be making the Mushroom Materials limited time only - much like Bunny Day's Eggs, and Wedding Seasons Heart Crystals - which would make these Mario items an absolute pain to get once the event has ended.

With Super Mushrooms as a material, we could see a new character introduced, or have the role passed onto an already existing character who'd give us DIY Recipes for Mario items, even allowing us to decorate our Island with the huge Mushroom and Yoshi Egg from Doubutsu no Mori e+! Crafting would be the most content-heavy option to introduce these items, but it's anyone's guess, and likely won't learn the exact details of the event until 2021.

Below we've included images of all the Super Mario items from previous iterations of Animal Crossing (though we could be missing some). They've given us a tonne already, but we can only hope for more! With Cat Mario being a popular pick from Super Mario 3D World, it's possible we may get something tied to that, or even an update on amiibo functionality to be compatible with the Mario amiibo! There's also a lack of actual Bowser representation, so we'd like to see something from his attire join the scene. We'd also be very surprised is Cappy didn't make an appearance...

For now, we've just decided to include what items, and how we expect them to be introduced into the game. Once official details become available, we'll be sure to report on them! As always, if you haven't already, be sure to follow us over on Twitter and Tumblr, as well as considering supporting us on Patreon if you're able to, your help and support goes a long way! Feel free to join our discord server too!