A whole slew of classic Nintendo 64 games have been announced as coming to Nintendo Switch Online’s N64 library. All three of the original Mario Party games will be making their long-awaited debut accompanied by both Pokémon Stadium titles, Pilot Wings 64, 1080º Snowboarding, Excitebike 64, and probably most excitingly, GoldenEye 007.
Since the service opened up to the first 3D Nintendo console library, the game announcements have been trickling in slowly, but during the September Nintendo Direct, we got a big announcement of games. The first two Mario Party games and Pilot Wings 64 are slated to be added sometime before the end of the year, likely one at a time per month, followed up by Mario Party 3 and the rest mentioned above starting in 2023. GoldenEye was announced last and was not given a release window, so that one may be coming a little later next year than the others, but the classic multiplayer will be returning to the Nintendo platform even though Rare is owned by Xbox these days.
GoldenEye 007 was the first big-time console first-person shooter to really take the world by storm. It was a revolution for the genre on a controller. Going back to it these days is a bit rough, considering the N64 controller only had one joystick. We will be interested to see if any modern-day modifications have been made to it or if it is a traditional game port. Regardless, getting this classic back with online play is very exciting for 90s kids.
That said, getting all of the above N64 classics is a big announcement for the service. Even with Mario Party Superstars hosting some of the boards included in the games coming to the service, being able to play these games with friends online is an exciting task, but be careful about your hand palms in the first title.
