Donkey Kong 64 joins Switch Online with widescreen and save states

Donkey Kong 64 is about to become more than a nostalgia play. Nintendo is using it as a showcase for how far its official N64 emulation layer has come, and how closely it now shadows the features hobbyists expect from a serious emulator build.

Nintendo’s Japanese announcement says the Rare-developed platformer will be added to NINTENDO 64 Nintendo Classics on June 4, 2026, and the game will sit behind Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack rather than the base subscription. In the United States, that tier costs $49.99 a year and bundles Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance, SEGA Genesis and Virtual Boy libraries, with GameCube Classics available on Switch 2. Nintendo’s N64 Classics page also promises online play for up to four players, which puts the service in the same conversation as the community setups that have long treated multiplayer, netplay and controller flexibility as essential, not optional.

The real story for emulation readers is the feature set. Nintendo says the game will arrive in an emulated form with full widescreen support, button remapping and save states, while the broader N64 Classics service has also picked up rewind and CRT filtering on Switch 2 for supported titles. That is the language of modern emulation, not just digital rerelease packaging. It is the same checklist hobbyists have spent years refining: make the game fit a widescreen display, let players remap controls, give them reliable saves, and smooth out the rough edges of old hardware on new screens.

That matters even more with Donkey Kong 64, a 1999 Rare release that was built around the Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak. The add-on doubled the console’s memory from 4 MB to 8 MB, and Donkey Kong 64 was one of the games that required it. For a time, it was Donkey Kong’s only 3D platformer, and Nintendo’s own description still leans on the game’s scale: Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Tiny Kong, Lanky Kong and Chunky Kong spread across eight stages, with coin collecting, blueprint hunting and fairy photography filling out the loop.

Nintendo already has a deep N64 lineup on the service, including Mario Kart 64, Ocarina of Time, Star Fox 64, Paper Mario and Super Mario 64. Donkey Kong 64’s arrival shows where the company is headed now: not just preserving classic software, but packaging it with the quality-of-life tools that define the best emulation today. For anyone watching Nintendo’s strategy, this is the clearest sign yet that the company is no longer treating emulation as a hidden layer. It is becoming the product.