Nearly six years after it launched, Nintendo Switch Online is still getting new NES classics added to its on-demand subscription service. Nintendo announced seven more games are now available to play. The esoteric bunch, which includes Mach Rider and The Mystery of Atlantis, means almost every first-party game every released on NES is now in the retro library.
Here’s the full list of surprise additions.
- Urban Champion
- Golf
- Donkey Kong Jr. Math
- Mach Rider
- The Mystery of Atlantis
- Solar Jetman
- Cobra Triangle
Urban Champion, Golf, Mach Rider, and Donkey Kong Jr. Math were all made and published by Nintendo. Cobra Triangle, an isometric action game featuring a sick-ass speedboat, and Solar Jetman, a sci-fi flight sim, were each worked on by Rare, with composer David Wise of Donkey Kong Country fame scoring both games. The Mystery of Atlantis is a much weirder one. Sunsoft’s Super Mario Bros.-inspired side-scroller was never released outside of Japan and looks tough as nails. There are 101 zones to explore and enemies kill you in one hit.
The most easily overlooked of the recent additions is potentially Golf, a basic sports sim launch title for the NES co-developed by Nintendo and HAL Laboratory. The late President of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, was the sole programmer on the project, and the game has been used in the past as a nod to his legacy and early death at the age of 55 due to cancer.
Switch hackers discovered back in 2017, the year the Switch was released, that the console contained a secret copy of Golf that would unlock and be playable on the date of his death, July 11, if players used the motion controls of the Joy-Con to imitate Iwata’s signature Nintendo Direct hand gesture. The hidden Easter Egg was later removed in firmware update 4.0.0. Fortunately, Golf is now back just a week ahead of the ninth anniversary of the long-time Nintendo developer’s passing.
