Nintendo Confirms Backward Compatibility: Switch 2 to Support Original Switch Games

Following Nintendo’s Corporate Management Policy Briefing, the company took to Twitter to announce that the games currently available for the Nintendo Switch will also be playable on its upcoming “successor to Nintendo Switch.” Many are casually referring to this new console as the Switch 2.

For those interested, you can find the full Management Policy Briefing on Nintendo’s website. It provides a detailed overview of the company’s current standing in the console market. Among the highlights is the impressive milestone of selling 146 million units across the Nintendo Switch Family. Remarkably, more games have been played on the Switch than on any previous Nintendo system. The comprehensive 59-page document dives into sales data and historical insights, also confirming that the Nintendo Switch Online service, along with other features like Music, will carry over to the new console’s release.

If you’re more familiar with Sony or Microsoft’s approaches to console compatibility, this announcement might not come as a huge surprise. Microsoft’s Xbox has long been a champion of backward compatibility, enhancing older Xbox and Xbox 360 titles with features like FPS Boost and Resolution Boost on their newer Xbox One and Xbox Series S/X consoles. Sony, on the other hand, has had a more restricted backward compatibility strategy since the PS3, which was fully compatible with its predecessors. Nevertheless, the PlayStation 5 supports most PS4 games quite well and even some PS2 and PS1 titles via emulation. Unfortunately for PlayStation users, PS3 compatibility relies on cloud streaming via PS4 and PS5.

In the realm of Nintendo’s backward compatibility, the company has generally performed well—up until the Switch. The Nintendo Wii U, for instance, could play games from both Wii and GameCube and had a Virtual Console that filled almost all gaps in Nintendo’s previous gaming libraries. Similarly, the Nintendo 3DS played Nintendo DS games, but it didn’t support Game Boy Advance titles or any other pre-dual screen handheld games made by Nintendo.

However, with the introduction of the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo moved away from backward compatibility. This major transition combined their handheld and home console divisions and switched from PowerPC to Arm CPU architecture. Thankfully, the Switch’s design and its use of Nvidia-powered mobile hardware have proved successful enough for Nintendo to maintain this approach. Now, those who are purchasing games today won’t face any issues playing them on the next-gen Switch 2 when it’s launched.

There’s also hope that some games that struggled with Nintendo’s original hardware, such as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, might finally run at above 60 frames per second without needing emulation software. Nintendo has been notably firm in cracking down on emulation, possibly because effective Switch emulators could potentially handle Switch 2 games as well, much like Dolphin did with GameCube and Wii titles.