Okay, we’ve all played and loved every Mario game (except maybe Sunshine) 15 times. We know the ins and outs of the pre-00′s 2D games better than we know our family tree. The sheer excellence of the first four Super Mario Bros. games make this week’s Friday Flashback one of Nintendo’s greatest releases and one of its worst shames.

In 1993, Nintendo released Super Mario All-Stars, a compilation cartridge for the SNES that featured Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, the “real” Super Mario Bros. 2 in the form of “The Lost Levels,” and Super Mario Bros. 3. It wasn’t just straight ports, like most anthology releases. Nintendo overhauled each game to take advantage of the SNES hardware. It changed every sprite, every animation, and every background to colorful, 16-bit goodness that made the original games look like cave paintings. It added a save file system, so players could put the game down and come back later. It made some of the best games on the NES even better.

The game reached its height later that year with a re-release that added Super Mario World to the already amazing collection. Super Mario World didn’t get any graphical enhancements, but it was already a gorgeous SNES games. It was only available as a pack-in with the “Super Mario SNES set,” a bundle Nintendo released in late 1993. Still, it was an amazing cartridge.

In 1993, Nintendo was on top of the world with classic gaming goodness. It seemed like it could do no wrong, between the value of Super Mario All-Stars and the rampant success of the SNES. Sadly, over the next 17 years, Nintendo’s greed would get the better of it, and one of the best anthology releases ever made would float out of our reach.

Things started going downhill in 2001. Nintendo took the graphically updated version of Super Mario Bros. 2 from Super Mario All-Stars and put it in the Game Boy Advance release of Super Mario Advance. Then Nintendo took Super Mario World and made it into Super Mario Advance 2. Finally, Nintendo ported the Super Mario All-Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 3 to the GBA and called it Super Mario Advance 4 (Super Mario Advance 3 was a port of Yoshi’s Island). What once was a single cartridge had become three, dropping the first Super Mario Bros. game and its rare and challenging Japan-only sequel in the process.

If you want to play those re-released games on your DS Lite (or, if you still have one, GBA), you should either be prepared to shell out some decent cash or hope you get very lucky on eBay. At Gamestop, used copies of the Super Mario Advance games retail for $20. Yes, even the naked, box-less, instruction manual-less Mario games you see behind those tiny glass cases cost more than most DS and Wii budget titles.

The announcement of the Wii Virtual Console offered some hope to see the enhanced versions of the original side-scrolling Mario games on a home console once again. The Wii has been out for four years now, and we’ve yet to see Super Mario All-Stars, or even the Super Mario Advance games on the Virtual Console. You can pick up every original Mario game on the VC, but if you want the enhanced versions you’re out of luck.

Worse yet, Nintendo has taken the idea of the anthology release and thrown it completely out the window. Each NES game costs $5 (except The Lost Levels, which costs $6). Each SNES game costs $8. If you want to recreate Super Mario All-Stars on your Wii, even without the graphical enhancements and save systems, you’ll have to drop $29 in the Wii Shopping Channel. For an inferior, kitbashed version of the amazing cartridge Nintendo released 17 years ago. Compare that price to any other retro game collection on any other system. What was once the best deal in all-in-one gaming has become one of the worst.

Nintendo could make a killing if it re-released Super Mario All-Stars on the VC, even at a premium. It could charge double the usual $8 SNES fee, and gamers would still buy it because it was just that good. Nintendo could port all the Super Mario All-Stars games to a DS card and charge $30-35, and it would be a massive seller. Instead, the company nickels and dimes us on the Virtual Console while keeping some of the best video game remakes out of our reach.