New Arrival: A 50-Yen Super Mario Land Eraser From 1989

Some of the collection's most touching objects are also its smallest and cheapest. This arrival cost fifty yen when it was new, a handful of loose change, and it was never meant to outlive a school term: a little Super Mario Land cap eraser, handed to Japanese Mario fans around the game's launch in 1989.

What It Is

Around the release of the hit game Super Mario Land, Nintendo offered these cute cap erasers to Mario fans in Japan for fifty yen each. Small promotional trinkets like this, produced in 1989, are the definition of ephemeral, cheap, plentiful and completely disposable, which is exactly why so few survive. A surviving example is a charming piece of very early Game Boy merchandise, and it joins the collection's other Super Mario Land curiosities.

1989 Super Mario Land cap eraser Japan promo

The World of the Keshigomu

There is a whole culture behind an object like this. In Japan, the character eraser, the keshigomu, was a playground institution: cheap moulded rubber figures of popular characters that children collected, traded and occasionally even used to rub out a mistake. Nintendo, alert as ever to its youngest fans, folded Mario into that world, turning a fifty-yen impulse buy into another small thread connecting children to the games they loved. The eraser was merchandising at its most grassroots, not a pricey statue for adults but pocket-money joy for kids.

The timing is what gives it real weight. Nineteen eighty-nine was the Game Boy's birth year, and Super Mario Land was one of the games that launched it. To hold a piece of merchandise from that exact moment, however humble, is to hold a fragment of the Game Boy's very first wave of cultural impact, before anyone knew how big it would all become. That the survivor is a fifty-yen eraser rather than something grand only makes it more evocative, a reminder that the phenomenon began with children and their pocket money.

Why It Joined the Collection

The most disposable objects are often the hardest to preserve and the most revealing to keep, and this eraser is a perfect example. It documents the everyday, pocket-money side of the Game Boy phenomenon at its very beginning, and it sits among the collection's other Super Mario Land pieces as one of the earliest. Keeping it holds on to a scrap of 1989 that was never supposed to last.

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