Nintendo Adds PAC-MAN and Two More NES Classics to Switch Online

Nintendo added PAC-MAN, Mendel Palace, and The Tower of Druaga to its Switch Online Nintendo Classics library on April 9, completing a three-game batch that shares a single unifying thread: Namco published all of them in Japan. That common publisher origin shapes the story of how each title arrived on modern hardware, because every classic-game addition to Switch Online starts not with code, but with a licensing conversation.

For Mendel Palace, that conversation involved two rights holders. Game Freak developed the 1989 puzzle title, Namco published it in Japan, and Hudson Soft distributed it in North America in 1990. Hudson's catalog now sits with Konami, meaning Nintendo needed sign-off from both Bandai Namco and Konami before the game could go live. That two-publisher provenance is a plausible reason a 37-year-old game is only reaching Switch Online now.

The game itself is the historical standout in this batch. Mendel Palace is Game Freak's debut, predating Pokémon Red and Blue by roughly seven years. Players control Bon-Bon across a 5-by-7 grid of floor tiles, flipping panels to fling enemy dolls and rescue Candy, a friend trapped inside her own dream. It arrived in Japan first, then came west the following year. Anyone curious about where the Pokémon studio's instincts for tight, systemic mechanics originally came from can now find out for free.

The Tower of Druaga has a different kind of delay in its history. Namco's 1984 arcade title spent nine years waiting for a North American console release due to licensing complications, finally shipping on NES in 1993. On Switch Online, the wait is over on day one: players take on the role of the knight Gilgamesh, climb 60 floors, and face the tower's ruler Druaga to rescue KI. PAC-MAN, the most recognizable name in the batch, arrives as its 1988 NES port, Toru Iwatani's maze game translated from cabinet to cartridge.

The emulation layer underneath all three titles carries a number worth knowing. Nintendo's in-house NES emulator currently passes 98 of 128 edge-case accuracy tests in the AccuracyCoin validation suite, the highest score any official Nintendo NES emulator has ever achieved and a significant improvement over the Virtual Console iterations that preceded it. Each new NES title added to Nintendo Classics clears that 98-test floor before shipping.

The compliance work distributes across three organizations: Mario Club in Japan, NOA Product Testing in North America, and NOE QA in Frankfurt, which handles localization of metadata and documentation into eight European languages. Nintendo moved away from the per-title testing model that defined Wii and Wii U Virtual Console because that approach was too resource-intensive to sustain at scale. The platform-level testing architecture that replaced it is what makes a monthly NES drop, and Game Freak's first-ever release landing quietly inside a subscription library, operationally routine.