Super Mario Sunshine Hits Nintendo Classics August 13, Alongside Two Virtual Boy Games Nobody Ever Got to Play

Nintendo has a habit of dropping news in the middle of the night through its Nintendo Today app, and this one was worth waking up to. Super Mario Sunshine, the GameCube classic that has spent years locked inside a discontinued collection, joins the Nintendo GameCube Nintendo Classics library on Switch 2 on August 13. And in the same breath, Nintendo announced something genuinely rarer: two Virtual Boy games that were finished in the mid 90s but never released are coming to the service on August 4.

That second part deserves a moment. These are not re-releases. Zero Racers and D-Hopper have never been playable by the public, anywhere, in three decades. Nintendo is effectively shipping two brand new 1996 games.

Video: Nintendo official channel on YouTube

Sunshine finally escapes its vault, with a catch

Super Mario Sunshine has been one of the hardest Mario games to play legally. Outside of original GameCube hardware, its only modern outing was Super Mario 3D All-Stars, the limited-run Switch collection Nintendo pulled from sale in early 2021. From August 13, anyone with a Switch 2 and a Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack membership can hose down Isle Delfino whenever they like.

The catch is the version. This is straight emulation of the 2002 GameCube release, and the entire announcement trailer runs in the original 4:3 aspect ratio, so do not expect the widescreen presentation the 3D All-Stars version offered. On the upside, F.L.U.D.D. was built around the GameCube pad's analog triggers, so playing with a GameCube-style controller on Switch 2 gets you closer to how the game was meant to feel than the 2020 collection ever did. The Switch 2 keeps quietly stacking up catalog wins like this, much as it did when Xenoblade Chronicles 2 arrived on the system earlier this week.

Two cancelled Virtual Boy games see daylight after 30 years

The August 4 update to the Virtual Boy Nintendo Classics library is the real collector's item here. Zero Racers, originally known as G-Zero, reimagines F-Zero as a 3D tunnel racer. D-Hopper, once called Dragon Hopper, is a top-down action-adventure from Intelligent Systems, the studio behind Fire Emblem and Paper Mario, starring a young dragon prince on a rescue mission. Both were essentially complete when the Virtual Boy's commercial collapse killed them before launch. The same update also lets you customize the app's screen color, so you are no longer stuck with the eye-searing red the hardware was infamous for.

For a company that just shut down Mario Kart Tour's content pipeline and rarely looks backward without a price tag attached, releasing two lost games inside an existing subscription is a surprisingly generous move. Sunshine purists will grumble about 4:3, and fairly. But between a vaulted Mario classic and two games nobody has ever played, this is the best week Nintendo Classics has had all year.