Switch Online adds classics

Nintendo just dropped three more Nintendo Entertainment System games into Nintendo Switch Online: Pac-Man, Mendel Palace, and The Tower of Druaga, and they are live now in the Nintendo Classics app for subscribers. Nintendo’s current membership page says the base service includes classic Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and Game Boy libraries, while the full classics catalog now tops 150 games. (nintendo.com) This is the cheaper tier of the service, not the Expansion Pack add-on that gates Nintendo 64 and Game Boy Advance games. Nintendo lists the standard Individual Membership at $19.99 for 12 months in the United States, which is why small retro drops like this are aimed at people already paying for online play and cloud saves. (nintendo.com) Pac-Man is the obvious headliner because it is one of the most recognizable arcade games Nintendo can add without needing a tutorial. Nintendo’s Nintendo Classics page says the app includes online features, so even a 1980 maze game lands inside a modern wrapper with suspend points and multiplayer-style sharing options across the broader retro app lineup. (nintendo.com) Mendel Palace is the deep cut in the batch, and that is what makes this update more interesting than a one-game nostalgia play. Reliable coverage of the release notes that Mendel Palace was a 1989 puzzle game developed by Game Freak before Game Freak became known worldwide for Pokémon, giving subscribers a look at an early studio artifact rather than just another evergreen mascot game. (nintendolife.com) The Tower of Druaga fills a different slot: it is older, stranger, and built around maze-like tower floors, hidden rules, and trial-and-error secrets. Contemporary coverage of the Nintendo Switch Online update identifies it as Namco’s 1984 action role-playing maze game, which means this one is less “play five minutes between errands” and more “get lost in an old design language from the arcade era.” (ign.com) All three games also fit the same publisher lane, because this update leans heavily on Namco history. Nintendo Life’s reporting says the set includes Namco’s Nintendo Entertainment System Pac-Man, Namco’s The Tower of Druaga, and Mendel Palace, which was published by Namco in Japan even though North America got it from Hudson Soft. (nintendolife.com) That mix tells you what Nintendo Switch Online’s retro catalog is trying to be in 2026: not just a museum of first-party Nintendo hits, but a rotating shelf of old third-party games that are cheap to sample and easy to revisit. Nintendo’s official classic-games page frames the service as a library rather than individual purchases, so the value pitch here is breadth over ownership. (nintendo.com) If you open the app this weekend, the three additions cover three very different moods in about 10 seconds: Pac-Man for instant recognition, Mendel Palace for puzzle curiosity, and The Tower of Druaga for old-school obscurity. That is a small update on paper, but it is exactly the kind of low-friction catalog growth Nintendo has been using to keep the base Nintendo Switch Online tier feeling alive between bigger releases. (nintendoeverything.com)