New Arrival: A 1989 Super Mario Land Coin, Struck for a Sea Dragon

It is fitting to end a run of new arrivals with a coin, and an especially fitting one: a small commemorative medal from 1989 that honours not Mario, but one of his most obscure foes, a sea dragon that even devoted fans struggle to name.

What It Is

Around the release of Super Mario Land, Nintendo issued a series of collector coins showing the game's characters. This one depicts Dragonzamasu, the boss of the game's underwater world. It is one of the early Japanese Super Mario Land collectibles in the collection, sitting alongside the cap erasers and the other 1989 merchandise from the game's launch. Small, sturdy and easily pocketed, coins like these were made to be gathered as a set.

A commemorative coin for a sea dragon even superfans cannot name. We love him anyway.

The Strange World of Super Mario Land

The choice of Dragonzamasu is a lovely deep cut, and it points to what made Super Mario Land so peculiar. Developed by Gunpei Yokoi's team rather than by Mario's usual creators, the game sent Mario somewhere strange, through Egyptian and ancient-world themed lands and an underwater realm, populated by enemies and bosses that appear almost nowhere else in the series. Dragonzamasu, a fearsome sea creature guarding one of those worlds, is exactly that kind of one-off oddity, a boss with no lasting fame, immortalised on a coin precisely because, in 1989, he was part of the fresh, unfamiliar world the Game Boy's first Mario game had conjured.

That is what makes the coin so charming to a collector. A piece of merchandise celebrating Mario himself would be unremarkable; one celebrating a forgotten sub-boss from the underwater stage is a tiny time capsule of how new and undefined the Super Mario Land universe felt at launch, before the series settled into familiar castles and Koopas. Metal coins survive better than paper or rubber, but a complete character set is still hard to assemble, and each individual coin, especially of a minor character, is a small, satisfying rescue of an easily overlooked piece of 1989.

Why It Joined the Collection

Early Japanese Super Mario Land collectibles are among the most evocative merchandise the collection holds, capturing the game at its strange, unfamiliar debut. This Dragonzamasu coin celebrates an obscure boss from the game's underwater world, and it joins the cap erasers and other 1989 pieces to build a little cluster of launch-era Super Mario Land memorabilia. Preserving it keeps a small, metal fragment of the Game Boy's first Mario adventure, and one of its most forgotten characters, safe.

The Super Mario Land coin is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.