TheNintendo Switch2 hasn’t even been announced yet, but we’ve been anticipating it for years. I thought it would release alongsideThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but that’s been and gone with no whiff of a sequel toNintendo’sbest-selling console. The OLED upgrade was a great mid-cycle refresh, making the screen more vibrant and improving on my original Switch’s dreadful battery life, but it’s more of a PS4 Pro than a PS5.
Players and journalists alike have been wishlisting Switch 2 features for as long as the console has been rumoured, but now that dev kits seem to be appearing andwhispers are becoming more concrete, I want to point out that there’s only one thing that’s important to the success of the Switch successor: backwards compatibility.
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We live in a time when it’s increasingly difficult to play old games. Try playingPokemon Redlegally right now if you don’t already own it. It’s not on the Nintendo Switch Online service, which currently seems limited to spin-offs of the RPG series. If you have a Nintendo DS lying around, you could buy the Virtual Console version, except that eShop servers were shut off earlier this year so no you can’t. You’re forced to head to CEX (other second-hand retailers are available), shell out £75 for a Game Boy and £32 for Pokemon Red. Oh you wanted that game in a box? Make that £98 for the game alone, £240 if you want it in mint condition.
While boxes and conditions won’t matter to a lot of people, the cheapest price I could find to play Pokemon Red legally was £82, for a battered Game Boy in red and the game to match. That’s silly money, and this isn’t even a particularly sought-after gameorconsole. You want to play Paper Mario on a GameCube? £200 easy. Retro gaming is getting prohibitively expensive, and games are being lost as technology moves past them, never looking back.
Preservation is the primary reason I’m so against the remakes and remasters that plague the industry at present. Developers want to create a new version of their games, with better graphics and modern controls and all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a game in 2023, but the originals are being lost in the process. As recently as the ‘00s, developers had to use clever trickery to make games look good or, in some cases, to run at all. Memory cards held a few megabytes of data, if you were lucky, and you had to really optimise every inch of space.
That’s not the case any more, as consoles and computers can handle anything game developers throw at them and file sizes often reach into triple figures. Remakes often forget the efforts that developers went to in order to actually make them run, and move towards photorealistic designs instead of embracing the slick art styles that older games were forced to employ to make up for the lack of graphical power.
Nintendo Switch Online is Nintendo’s attempt to monetise its back catalogue, which is a predatory practice in itself. Sure, you can pay for access to these games, but we can revoke that access at any time or if you let your subscription payments lapse. This isn’t ownership, and nor is it preservation. That said, it’s better than remakes, if only slightly.
If Nintendo wants to truly get players on board with its vision of the future, it needs to stop chasing a crappy Game Pass alternative and create a console that truly preserves gaming culture. The Switch sequel needs backwards compatibility in order to keep old games alive and keep players on side.
Imagine if the Switch 2 comes out and you may’t play Pikmin 4 or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Imagine you’ve dropped a three-figure sum on two games that you can no longer play. I, like many people, will likely trade in my current Switch in order to afford a successor, and will therefore have no way of playing these old games if the Switch 2 doesn’t have backwards compatibility.
This seems like a silly question, but it was exactly the case when Nintendo jumped from the New 3DS to the Switch. If you consider the Switch more of a home console than a handheld, rest safe in the knowledge that it couldn’t play Wii games either. I’m not asking that the Switch be able to play DS games, have a port for Game Boy cartridges, and a disc drive for GameCube, N64, and Wii offerings, because I know that won’t happen. It would be a paragon of game preservation if it did that, but I’m not holding my breath. Nintendo is committed to Switch-sized cartridges at this point, so I just hope that the Switch 2 can play games made for its predecessor.
Nintendo needs to make a pro-consumer move in an era when companies are eager to sell your old games back to you, either through remakes or subscription services. Nintendo’s as guilty of this as Sony or Microsoft, but the Switch 2 is a chance for atonement. The Switch 2 needs to be backwards compatible with the current console as a bare minimum, but I hope that will be a springboard to make old games more accessible across the board. Nobody should be shelling out three figures to play a 25 year old Pokemon game, and Nintendo should do better at letting us play its games.
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