As you’ve no doubt seen, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is getting another massive update early next year, along with a Switch 2 Edition with the expected enhancements (Mouse Mode, wooo). But amongst all the Bells and whistles announced, you might have missed the news that retro Nintendo games are also returning to the series. Hurrah!
Yes, you will once again be able to play 8-bit and higher-bit classics in Animal Crossing, just like you could in the original game back on GameCube! However, there are some caveats.
According to the announcement, there’ll be a new resort hotel added on the pier in the 3.0 update where you can help out and, by increasing its “island brand recognition”, a souvenir shop will start stocking new items. On one of the tabs labelled ‘Special’, you’ll find a host of retro Nintendo hardware, including the Ultra Hand, the Love Tester, and a bunch of lovely Nintendo consoles. Yaaaaas.
Buying these with the new currency lets you set them up in your room as you’d expect. However, if you’ve got an active NSO subscription, you can play “a select classic game on each system.” Ice Climber, Clu Clu Land, and Dr. Mario (for the Game Boy) are shown in the clip.
The consoles shown include a Switch 2, Famicom, NES, Famicom Disk System, Game Boy, and Super Famicom, so it looks like we’re going up to at least 16-bit this time!
For those who weren’t there, the first Animal Crossing game had a selection of NES games, including games like Donkey Kong and Excitebike, that you could obtain and actually play in the game long, long before Virtual Console turned up and having retro titles on your current Nintendo system was a matter of course.
So, the retro games are back in AC! But only one per system, and probably not the classics you were hoping for.
Of course, there’s no reason to be glum because all the games are playable in a more straightforward way via NSO itself. Still, we kind of hope Nintendo might decide to let you play all the games in the NSO library through this Animal Crossing wrapper. Pointless? Sure. But delightful? Absolutely.
Elsewhere, a bunch of cool collabs with other Nintendo games will see Zelda and Splatoon items crop up in New Horizons.
Do you think they’ll get N64, the upcoming Virtual Boy, or GameCube in there too? Is there a scenario (stick with me here) where we could be playing the original GC Animal Crossing NES games in the original GC Animal Crossing in this Animal Crossing?
Woah. Let us know which game you think they’ll make accessible for the other systems below.
