After months of rumours, speculation, and wishful thinking, Nintendo has finally announced a bevy of classic SNES titles for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, including Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Super Metroid.
The news came during Nintendo’s Direct presentation last night, where it was confirmed that 20 SNES games would be joining the library of NES titles that are available for those who’ve subscribed to the Nintendo Switch Online service. The SNES games have been added to the service and will be available to play in the UK tomorrow (September 6),
Check out the full lineup below.
As is the case with the NES games in the classic library, players will be able to make use of a rewind function to save/load whatever game they’re playing at any point so that they can return to specific moments or levels at their leisure. Online multiplayer will be also be available for certain titles.
Oh yes, I am all about the idea of playing some classic Mario Kart online.
Nintendo abandoning the virtual console model in favour of making its impressive back catalogue via a subscription service is a huge move, and classics like A Link to the Past and Super Mario World – which are still regarded as two of the greatest games of all time – makes the Switch Online service that much more worthwhile.
Previous Nintendo consoles would typically only make SNES titles available through individual purchases. With no cross-buy functions, fans would have to (and often did) double or triple dip for certain games across various Nintendo consoles. I, for example, picked up Super Metroid on Wii, 3DS, and Wii U. Yes, I am an idiot.
It was also confirmed that more SNES titles will be added to the service as time goes on, so hopefully we’ll see the bizarre cult RPG Earthbound in there eventually. Seriously, everybody needs to play Earthbound. Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger wouldn’t go amiss, either.
As if that wasn’t enough for the retro gaming lovers out there, Nintendo also announced a wireless SNES controller for the Switch that’s been designed exclusively to work with the available Super Nintendo titles.
We had a about a year of NES titles being added to the service before we got last night’s announcement that SNES games would be joining in on the action. Hopefully this indicates that this time next year .we’ll be tucking into a string of N64 classics on Switch. We can dream, right?
If you have a story you want to tell, send it to UNILAD via story@unilad.com
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.