Super Mario Cereal – Part of a Complete Breakfast

Readers of a certain age know that Nintendo is for breakfast now. And, further, that it is a cereal—wow! Or, at least, it was back in the late 1980s.

A couple of years after the above commercial premiered, the prophet Q-Tip asked his father, “Well, daddy, don’t you know that things go in cycles?” and much in the same way that Bobby Brown was just amping like Michael, Nintendo has once again jumped into the breakfast game. Like the classic Nintendo Cereal System, Super Mario Cereal is a fruit-flavored crunch, but that’s where the similarities end.

Unlike the previous bisected box—”Two cereals in one! Wow!”—this new cereal puts Mario solely in the spotlight. Released as a limited edition product and hitting store shelves this week, it’s a clever bit of cross-promotion with Kellogg’s geared at spotlighting recent Nintendo Switch release Super Mario Odyssey. It’s not exactly like SMO (or the Switch itself) needs any help moving units, but it’s a fun, nostalgic throwback with a twist.

As a breakfast option, Super Mario Cereal splits the difference by offering both fruity star-shaped cereal pieces and Lucky Charms-style marshmallows designed to look like Mario’s iconic power-ups. Individually, they’re both passable, but their flavors combined make for a pleasant mix of sugary sweetness with just a hint of tangy bite.

But even the unique flavor isn’t the selling point here. Super Mario Cereal boasts box art featuring Mario and Cappy as well as the requisite back-of-the-box activities. Also on the back of said box is a specially designed area in the lower-right corner that acts just like one of Nintendo’s popular amiibo figurines.

Scan the appropriate area using your right Joy-Con and you’ll receive in-game Super Mario Odyssey perks like gold coins or a heart. Admittedly, these aren’t the most exotic of prizes, but coupled with the novelty of scanning a cereal box into a video game, it was definitely a crowd-pleaser in my household of the Nintendo faithful.

Have you been able to track down a box of Super Mario Cereal? If so, did you actually open and eat the contents or is this purely a collector’s item? Are these brightly colored boxes destined to languish on shelves or be snatched up by eager eBay speculators? Let us know in the comments below.

Review materials provided by: Nintendo of America