Three NES games added to NSO

Nintendo quietly used a routine subscription update on April 9, 2026 to drop one of the most recognizable arcade games ever made and one of the strangest early pieces of Pokémon history into the same library. Nintendo Switch Online members can now play Pac-Man, Mendel Palace, and The Tower of Druaga in the Nintendo Entertainment System catalog. (nintendo.com) All three games sit inside the base Nintendo Switch Online membership, not the more expensive Expansion Pack tier. Nintendo says the Nintendo Entertainment System app now offers more than 100 Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Nintendo Entertainment System games at no extra charge beyond the subscription. (nintendo.com) Pac-Man is the easy sell here because it is the 1988 Nintendo Entertainment System version of a game almost everyone can explain in one sentence: eat every dot in a maze before the ghosts catch you. Nintendo’s own description still leans on the same hooks that made it work in arcades decades ago, including warp tunnels, Power Pellets, fruit bonuses, and score chasing. (nintendo.com) Mendel Palace is the deeper cut, and that is why longtime fans noticed it first. Nintendo describes it as a 1990 action game where Bon-Bon flips floor panels to smash enemies and rescue Candy from a dream world filled with hostile dolls. (nintendo.com) The extra pull is who made it. Multiple reports on this week’s release identify Mendel Palace as the first game developed by Game Freak, the studio that later built Pokémon, which turns a small Nintendo Entertainment System puzzle game into a piece of origin-story archaeology. (polygon.com) (theverge.com) The names on the original Mendel Palace team are now almost absurd in hindsight. Public game databases list Satoshi Tajiri as director and designer, Ken Sugimori as artist, and Junichi Masuda as composer, which means three future pillars of Pokémon were already working together on an 8-bit maze-and-panel game in 1989. (wikipedia.org) The Tower of Druaga is older and rougher, but it fills a different slot in game history. Nintendo’s version has you control Gil, search each floor for a key, survive traps and spell attacks, and clear secret tasks that unlock hidden items you actually need to finish the climb. (nintendo.com) That design is why Druaga still gets talked about by historians even when newer players bounce off it. Contemporary coverage of this week’s release describes it as a 1984 Namco action role-playing maze game, a useful label because it sits halfway between a fast arcade chase game and a dungeon crawler that expects note-taking and trial and error. (nintendolife.com) There is also a quiet pattern in the lineup Nintendo picked. Nintendo Life and Video Games Chronicle both note that all three additions were originally tied to Namco in Japan, so this is less a random grab bag than a small Namco-themed refresh for the service. (nintendolife.com) (videogameschronicle.com) That is the real shape of the update: one mass-market classic, one historically important Game Freak debut, and one famously cryptic Namco relic that helped define early maze-action role-playing games. For Nintendo, that is a cheap way to keep a subscription library feeling alive without needing a new blockbuster every month. (nintendo.com) (polygon.com)