Nintendo’s E3 presentation showcased a lot of big name games for it’s flagship system. Some people might be more excited for the announcement that closed out the offerings they had for the public to see, some old school arcade games that haven’t seen a public release in decades.
Nintendo has opened it’s platform to the Arcade Archives, a series that ports old arcade games to current gen systems. There is a plethora of the games already available. These ports are available across all three of the major systems, but Nintendo gets some of these exclusively and two of more have been announced.
The original Donkey Kong arcade game from 1981 is the first that was announced. There will be three different versions: The original Japanese release, which still had some major bugs; the fixed Japanese release; and the slightly-tweaked “International” version, which is what we got in the U.S. There is still one employee working at Nintendo today that was around when this game originally released, Don James, and he was on hand to announce this game. He still had another arcade title to show off…
A pretty obscure game only known to the most hardcore of arcade enthusiasts– Sky Skipper, was the next and final game announced. When I say obscure, I mean it. Only 10 cabinets were ever made. These 10 were sent out to various locations for testing in bars and arcades, but little to no interest was shown in them. They were taken out of circulation pretty quickly, and only one remains operational- and that one is conveniently located in Nintendo’s HQ. The artwork for the cabinet was drawn by the legendary visionary at Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto, and classic arcade game lovers have been clamoring for this title to come out of it’s forced retirement.
I’m pretty indifferent about arcade titles in general. I think a lot of their appeal stems from nostalgia, of which I have none for these. We start hearing some news about ports of Nintendo 64 games, and that’s a different story. Either way, these new additions to the Arcade Archives will be coming soon to your Nintendo Switch.