Hi everybody, for some odd reason I still can’t stop thinking about Nintendo 64 games coming to Nintendo Switch Online, and over the past months this year, I started thinking about Nintendo’s actions relating to the service and what their recent announcements in the Directs this year. So I’ll be discussing the evidence I found for my thoughts about N64 coming to NSO. A little disclaimer: I’m not spreading a rumor that we will get N64 games for NSO because I’m not a leaker. This is just me thinking about all the evidence I found and wondering how it will be very possible it will happen, but I don’t 100% know if this is all going to happen because it’s still the second week of August, and next month we will have the next Nintendo Direct which is probably the best way to announce it coming. That being said, let’s look at the evidence I found.

I suppose the best place to start is back around September 2nd last year when Nintendo announced the 35th anniversary of Super Mario Bros, and announced a Direct relating to all of the content for it from September 2020 to March 2021. The last thing they announced in it was Super Mario 3D All Stars for the Switch. When I saw this, I legitimately thought this was a teaser for Nintendo 64 games coming to Nintendo Switch Online, but as soon as I saw the “Press +” sign on the lower left corner of the screen, and how there’s no player icon on the upper left of the screen, this made me realize it was something else: a collection of three 3D Super Mario titles in one collection: Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy. (Note: the first half of my evidence is relating to this game.) which was available for a limited amount of time. This made me think that it’s limited release time was suspicious since day one of its announcement, and when playing through all three games included were in fact emulated with minor changes from removing the speaker setting for 64 and Sunshine and all three games’ text changed to match the Switch’s controls, to major changes like Sunshine playing in a 16:9 aspect ratio and Galaxy’s spin attack being mapped to a button press and star cursor working with the touch screen in handheld mode. Super Mario 64 however has very little to no major changes including how it keeps the original 4:3 aspect ratio, doesn’t have any graphical enhancements like the DS remake, and keeps some bugs like how Mario sometimes shakes when landing on a platform he might fall down. Even though the collection was nothing special and is a simple collection, data miners found something interesting hence why all three games were actually emulated: six other N64 roms inside consisting of Mario Golf, Mario Tennis, Paper Mario, Kirby 64, Pokemon Snap, and Perfect Dark. Hearing about this in an article and another video with the same kind of information made me think even more about what this whole limited time release for the game means, and if it was some kind of guinea pig for something bigger.

Moving onto the present time when 3D All Stars was pulled out of the eShop, I noticed the Nintendo 64 will turn 25 in Japan on June 23rd, and since E3 makes its return after being cancelled last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was hoping to see it come in there. Although we didn’t get it there, it did mention The Legend of Zelda’s 35th anniversary near the end, although they said that there are no campaigns(which I believe is the Direct they’re talking about much like with Mario.) which made me believe that on September, there will be a normal Nintendo Direct coming soon. I don’t know if it’s because of the pandemic that made them not make a Direct for Zelda or the four games we did get in the E3 Nintendo Direct including an expansion pass for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Clamanity, more information on Skyward Sword HD, a Game & Watch Zelda(which is where they mentioned the 35th anniversary of the franchise.), and the long awaited sequel to Breath of the Wild are all we’re getting for the anniversary.

For my last pieces of evidence, we now come to the present day last month. Around this time, someone asked Nintendo about the future of Nintendo Switch Online, and they responded with the fact that they’re increasing the appeal of the service. They didn’t say exactly what their plans are for increasing the appeal, but I couldn’t think of anything besides the Nintendo 64 coming(and increasing stability for online play) for what they could do. I also noticed with the recent update for the systems we do have for the service, there are only three SNES games included in it: Claymates, Jelly Boy, and Bombuzal. No NES games were announced in it (and no, the Special version of Super Mario Bros 3 doesn’t count because that’s just a port of an existing game, just transferred to near the end of the game like most of the Special versions of other games.) which felt a bit suspicious to me just like with all the way to the beginning of where my thoughts were at. With there being no NES games in this update, does this mean we might get a new system in the next update? But perhaps the biggest elephant in the room has to be what I said about the N64’s 25th anniversary in Japan. Remember, June 23rd was the Japanese release date, and since I’m in North America, it came out later on September 29th in the same year 1996. Since the online service came out in September 2018 with a collection of NES games included, and SNES games came out a year later in 2019, this makes me believe that we might get N64 on September when the next Direct comes out to officially celebrate the system’s 25th anniversary, if not, I wouldn’t mind Game Boy came along too, as long as they figure out how to run multiplayer on that system since they don’t use a single screen multiplayer. And that’s all I found for the service, I hope this proves what I found is true, but on the other hand, there’s at least something that will grab my attention since we never know what we’ll get when watching a Nintendo Direct.