Nintendo randomly announced a ton of new content coming to Animal Crossing: New Horizons in a couple of months. That includes new Nintendo crossover items you can purchase from Nook’s Cranny. These will apparently let you play some classic games like Ice Climber. It’s a neat nod to one of the coolest parts of the 2002 Animal Crossing on GameCube, except that this time around it’ll require a paid subscription to access. Boo!
It was a neat surprise going about your business in Animal Crossing and randomly discovering a game like Excitebike for the NES. No, it wasn’t just for decoration. You could actually activate it and play Shigeru Miyamoto’s original 1984 racer via a fully-functioning in-game NES emulator. A bunch of other classics were available to collect as well. Some, like Punch-Out!!!, were only available through special codes. Others, like Ice Climber, required special e-reader cards.
Imagine winning a random raffle or shaking a tree and being blessed with a free copy of the original Donkey Kong. Back in 2002 there was both the novelty of playing one game within another game and the appetite for older games that weren’t otherwise backwards compatible on modern hardware. Maybe your mom buried the NES up in the attic or sold it to help buy the SNES. Maybe Balloon Fight got lost when the kid down the street never gave it back.
I booted up Animal Crossing so many times just to go back and play Punch-Out!!, which even at the time felt strangely nostalgic (and also a pain on the GameCube controller).
Nintendo crossover items, Lego Items, Zelda items/characters (Tulin, Mineru) and Splatoon items are coming to Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
When you purchase Nintendo system items, you can play a game from that system!
For NES it’s Ice Climbers and for Game Boy it’s Dr.… pic.twitter.com/YtyGCP3Nzo
— Stealth (@Stealth40k) October 30, 2025
So it’s a rad idea to bring that feature back for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but a huge bummer that these games will only work with Switch Online where…you’ve already been able to go and play them for years. It doesn’t even sound like the full suite of NES classics will be injected into Animal Crossing when its free update arrives on January 15.
Nintendo stresses you’ll only be able to play a “select classic game on each system,” and for the purposes of the trailer at least, it only confirms Famicom, NES, and Game Boy furniture pieces. So you’ll have access to the handheld version of Dr. Mario, but no word on if something like Super Metroid will be available with a possible SNES your Villager can buy from the Nook kids.
Why not just make these games free for people who own New Horizons? I have no idea. Got to protect the value proposition of titles that came out over three decades ago and which Nintendo has sold multiple times before across half a dozen different platforms, I guess. Here’s to whichever poor kid accidentally buys Ice Climber in Animal Crossing: New Horizons next year and gets instructed to input their parents’ credit card information when they try to play it without a subscription.
