The 10 games that defined the Nintendo Switch

What games do you think of when you think of Nintendo’s Switch? There are several obvious answers; Nintendo’s in-house studios never fail to leave their mark on a system with a handful of brilliant games. Yet one of the most notable things about the Switch, as it prepares to cede the limelight to Switch 2 after eight years on the market, is that it has been less software-dependent than, perhaps, any Nintendo console since the NES.

Of course the Switch wouldn’t be the success it has been without its biggest games. In its first year, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe helped the console find a massive audience. Yet both started as games for Wii U, Nintendo’s least successful platform. The Switch really was a case of a console that carved out a space for itself by arriving with the right form factor at the right time. The games that worked well on it found a console that was uniquely capable of adapting itself to suit them and helping them find players, rather than the other way around.

The Switch began a new era for Nintendo as a platform holder that began to look a little more like the others, even if it continued to play by its own rules. The games that defined the console aren’t necessarily the best or the biggest. Shockingly, they don’t include a mainline Mario platform game. They’re the games that described what the Switch meant to players, and how it changed Nintendo — and the rest of the game industry. 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ unprecedented success on Switch was a mixed blessing. It was in no small part a blockbuster hit due to the devastating worldwide pandemic that forced us indoors and into isolation around its release. New Horizons gave many of its players a taste of connection and community when they couldn’t physically meet up with friends, family, and colleagues.

But New Horizons was more than just a digital alternative to real-world socializing. It was a place where we made new virtual friends, found comfort in routine, and exercised control over our lives, albeit imaginary ones lived on our own private islands. The coziness of Animal Crossing was a refuge during a difficult stretch.

That’s not to say that New Horizons wasn’t an enjoyable evolution of the Animal Crossing experience on its own merits. It was. There was joy to be found in building and customizing a home — and even in paying it off — and exploiting the game’s quirks to amass riches. Millions of us delighted in daily interactions with Isabelle, Blathers, and the Nook boys, and waited with anticipation as new villagers visited our town, praying that we’d pull a “dreamy.” It was a brief taste of video game monoculture, fueled by the state of the world, and a defining moment in the Switch’s success. —Michael McWhertor

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Breath of the Wild has become so inextricably linked with the Switch that it’s easy to forget it was also released on Wii U, and in fact was announced as a Wii U game before we even knew what the Switch was. Nintendo’s decision to pivot it to a cross-gen release gifted the Switch what might be the greatest launch title of all time.

Beyond that, it marked a creative turning point for Nintendo as a game developer, and sent a clear message that the Switch was ushering in a new era for the company. The game’s bold, nonlinear, systemic design was a huge departure for the Zelda series, synthesizing many influences from beyond Nintendo’s Miyamoto-worshipping bubble into something that was distinctive and original, but also felt like it had been made in a world where Skyrim and Minecraft had happened. The sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, took things even further by giving players an astonishing, almost game-breaking level of creative freedom.

Breath of the Wild turned one of Nintendo’s oldest franchises into its most modern. It also outsold every mainline Mario game on the Switch, a first for the Zelda series. It was quite clear that Nintendo would never be the same again. —Oli Welsh

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Switch was a platform for second chances. Many of Nintendo’s games that failed to break through on the poorly selling Wii U found new life on Switch, including the Splatoon franchise, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, and Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. But none of those ports and rereleases have enjoyed the incredible success of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, a souped-up version of the 2014 kart racer that has since gone on to outsell its predecessor eight times over.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the Switch game; two out of every five Switch owners have a copy. It was so successful for Nintendo that, five years after Deluxe launched, the company released 48 more courses and eight additional characters as DLC. In an equally important move, Nintendo included that DLC as part of its Nintendo Switch Online subscription, part of the company’s plan to offer more than just multiplayer connectivity and classic games.

It’s telling that the first game Nintendo has shown for Switch 2 is a new Mario Kart. Deluxe not only brought in all-new fans of the Mario Kart franchise, it helped get the storied franchise back on, ahem, track. —MM

The Witcher 3

Let’s be honest; the Switch is not the ideal platform to play The Witcher 3. Nintendo’s console is manifestly underpowered for a game that was cutting-edge in 2015 and remained a technical showpiece when Nintendo’s console launched two years later. At the time, Nintendo was also not a natural home for such bloody, sexy, world-weary fare.

This is precisely why the Switch port of The Witcher 3 is so important. It’s significant that anyone tried to make it, and incredible that they pulled it off. Nintendo had long left the world of AAA gaming behind, and even during the success of the Wii, big publishers tended not to bring their marquee titles over because they were too technically demanding or aimed at a perceived different market. When the Wii U flopped, many third parties deserted Nintendo altogether.

The Switch, however, was not just a huge sales success — with its appealing form factor and the undeniable Breath of the Wild, it had thrust Nintendo back into the hearts of the core gaming community. All of a sudden, third parties were clamoring to be part of it, and a few studios began to specialize in cramming AAA titles onto Switch’s aging mobile chipset and into the tight confines of its game cards. A wave of “miracle” ports began with 2016’s Doom, and of these, the 2019 port of The Witcher 3 was the white whale. Not long after, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X widened the technical gulf again to a point where the ports would start to dry up — but you can expect the floodgates to reopen on Switch 2. —OW

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

“Everyone is here!” Nintendo promised with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. The game maker not only kept that promise, it overdelivered with one of the most impressive expansions to any Nintendo franchise ever. In addition to stacking the game’s core roster with 69 playable characters, including every fighter who’d ever appeared in a Smash Bros. game and surprising newcomers like Castlevania’s Simon and Metroid’s Ridley, the game’s developers pulled off what felt like impossible licensing deals. Banjo and Kazooie. Kingdom Hearts’ Sora. Final Fantasy 7’s Sephiroth. Minecraft’s Steve and Alex. 

The massive growth of the Switch and the fervor for more Super Smash Bros. seemed to feed off of each other. Led by tireless game maker Masahiro Sakurai, the yearslong development of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate resulted in the series’ biggest entry yet, so gargantuan that one has to question if Nintendo and Sakurai can ever top it.

And while Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was a major step forward for the franchise, Nintendo’s approach to esports and its games being featured at non-Nintendo-sanctioned events hasn’t evolved much during the Switch era. —MM

Nintendo Labo

Who would have seen Labo coming? Nintendo’s DIY “build-and-play” line of accessories let Switch owners craft cardboard “Toy-Con” versions of real-world items like a 13-key piano, fishing rod, and motorbike — and even a VR headset — for an all-new play experience that evoked the wild accessories released during the Wii era. 

In retrospect, it’s almost shocking that Nintendo Labo arrived just 13 months after the release of the Switch. What now feels like a late-life cycle attempt to reinvigorate the Switch with a gimmick was just another moment of unexpected innovation from Nintendo.

While interest in Labo died out fairly quickly (building the Toy-Cons was 90% of the fun), it was a reminder of the uniqueness and adaptability of the Switch Joy-Cons to act as more than just conveniently detachable controllers — an idea that Nintendo would later explore with the similarly creative and unexpected Ring Fit Adventure. —MM

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet

It might seem strange to choose Scarlet and Violet to represent Pokémon on this list. Of the Switch’s mainline Pokémon titles, Sword and Shield were better received by fans and even sold better (by a hair’s breadth). But it’s precisely because of their performance woes and uninspired design that Scarlet and Violet are, sadly, more symptomatic of the Switch era.

The runaway success of the Switch always represented a risk that Nintendo might rush too keenly to capitalize, letting its famous quality control standards slip in the process. As far as its internal studios were concerned, iron discipline was maintained, but Nintendo didn’t have as much success in keeping its partners at The Pokémon Company and developer Game Freak in check.

The Switch saw 12 Pokémon games released in six years, including four (soon to be five) major Game Freak titles; the developer released Scarlet and Violet and the superior Pokémon Legends: Arceus in the same year. It was just too much, and Scarlet and Violet bore the signs of an exhausted studio trapped in a content grind. You really can have too much of a good thing. —OW

Tetris 99

Pairing the greatest video game of all time with the hot genre of the moment for Tetris 99 felt both like a uniquely classic Nintendo move and surprisingly forward-thinking for the company. While other game makers chased variations on the battle royale shooter, Nintendo and developer Arika took a different approach, resulting in a frenetically fun, all-ages take on what is traditionally a violent genre.

Shadow-dropped as a bonus perk for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers in 2019, the release of Tetris 99 brought fresh buzz to the Switch. Its success spawned even more variations on the battle royale formula from Nintendo, with Super Mario Bros. 35 and F-Zero 99. (Arika also created a 99-player battle royale version of Pac-Man for Bandai Namco.)

Tetris 99’s most lasting impact, however, may be its role as a value add for NSO subscribers. Nintendo, having already mined most of its back catalog from the NES and SNES era for Nintendo Switch Online’s classic games offerings, will need more games like Tetris 99 to keep Switch 2 owners interested and subscribed to the service. —MM

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

The Switch era has run parallel with a surge in interest in Japanese-made RPGs, and it’s very much not a coincidence. Japanese publishers and developers naturally flooded to the console, which had huge sales in their home market, at the same time as the overseas anime boom created just the right cultural environment for these games to have an international moment. Nintendo saw the opportunity and lent a hand, often shining a light on Japanese-made games in its Direct broadcasts, and occasionally stepping in to co-publish games like Square Enix’s gorgeous throwback Octopath Traveler.

Nintendo was well placed to benefit from this snowball effect with some of its own games, including the Xenoblade Chronicles series. But the ultimate example was 2019’s Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Intelligent Systems’ tactical RPG series had always been beloved within its specific niche, but the audience the Switch had amassed for anime-flavored RPGs turned it into something bigger — a sort of viral hit, powered by players’ obsession over the game’s characters and relationships and its Harry Potter-style system of rival school houses. Three Houses showed how the Switch was, and remains, one of the most fandom-friendly platforms around. —OW

Hollow Knight

While major third parties took a little longer to turn their oil tankers in Nintendo’s direction, the indie developer scene saw the potential of Nintendo’s machine almost instantly and rushed to take advantage. For several years, it was common for indies to release their hits on Steam and Switch first, and worry about PlayStation and Xbox later. The Switch’s humble tech was no barrier to these games, and the immediacy of their designs often suited portable play perfectly.

The two games that most symbolize the Switch’s indie era are 2018’s Hollow Knight and 2020’s Hades — both fantastically refined action games in popular genres that are tricky to get right (Metroidvania and roguelike, respectively). Both found huge audiences, thanks in part to the Switch’s enormous reach. Of the two, it’s probably Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight that is more closely associated with the Switch — if only because its long, long-awaited sequel Silksong was first announced at a Nintendo Direct, and the increasingly desperate anticipation of new info about the game ahead of every Direct since has become a meme. —OW