According to reports from some dataminers and eagle-eyed gamers, Nintendo looks to be planning to expand the offerings of retro games on the Switch Online service. Specifically we’re talking about the recently released ability for those paying into the service to gain the ability to play tons of NES games on their Switch consoles. Gamers also get access to cloud save and the potential for multiplayer action on those games that support it for the $20 entry fee per month. It’s pretty cool, and it looks like things are about to get even better.
According to Nintendo Life, a data mining effort has uncovered a ton of games buried in the code for the latest Switch Online update. To be fair, the actual data is just strings which contain references to different NES and SNES game names, so it’s not confirmed that all of these games will be released. It’s possible that these games are just being tested behind the scenes or something, only time will tell what Nintendo is actually going to do with the Switch’s online library of games.
The full list of games included in the list is as followed:
- Super Mario Kart
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
- Demon’s Crest
- Yoshi’s Island
- Stunt Race FX
- Kirby’s Dream Course
- Pop’n Twinbee
- Star Fox
- Contra 3
- Kirby Super Star
- Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts
- Kirby’s Dream Land 3
- Super Metroid
- Super Mario World
- Pilotwings
- F-ZERO
- Star Fox 2
- Super Punch-Out!!
- The Legend of the Mystical Ninja
- Super Mario All-Stars
- Breath of Fire 2
And while this impressive list is quite comprehensive, some major titles that would be easy picks for the big N to bring in more punters are missing. Franchise entries like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI are absent, but they may be added later, only future data mining or official announcements will let us find out what’s going on.
But that’s not all!
It turns out that further digging through the code revealed the potential for more consoles to be emulated on the app for the Switch. Some people are speculating that the SNES Classic Emulator could be ported to the Switch, which sounds reasonable because the NES emulation on the console is basically just a part of the NES Classic code. although this hasn’t been explicitly confirmed. There’s also some suspicion that the Game Boy and Game Boy Advanced could join the service, but this is just speculation.
