Three classic Game Boy games hit Nintendo Switch Online on October 27

Nintendo is adding three original Game Boy titles to the Nintendo Switch Online catalog on October 27, 2026: Mole Mania, Revenge of the 'Gator, and Avenging Spirit. Because these are original 8-bit Game Boy releases rather than Game Boy Advance titles, they're included in the base $19.99-per-year subscription without needing the pricier Expansion Pack tier.

If you're already paying for Switch Online just to keep cloud saves alive or play Mario Kart, it's nice that obscure portable games keep showing up at no extra cost. All three were last sold digitally on the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console, which vanished when Nintendo shut down the 3DS eShop in March 2023.

Miyamoto's overlooked burrowing puzzler

Mole Mania is the clear standout of the trio. Co-developed by Nintendo EAD and Pax Softnica, the top-down puzzle-adventure game launched in Japan in 1996 (as Mogurānya) before reaching North America in February 1997. It was directed by Masao Yamamoto and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, yet it rarely gets mentioned alongside the Mario and Zelda creator's major hits because it arrived late in the handheld's lifecycle just as Pokémon fever was taking over.

You play as Muddy Mole, whose wife and seven children have been kidnapped by a farmer named Jinbe. Rescuing them requires pushing, pulling, and throwing black iron balls to clear obstacles across eight worlds, digging holes to slip between the surface and an underground layer to route around walls. Critics praised its clever two-layer spatial puzzles and expressive animations at launch, though it was a commercial sleeper. I'm curious to see how forgiving the Switch's rewind function makes the later boss fights, because accidently plugging your own escape tunnel with a heavy cabbage was always an easy way to ruin a run.

Four screens of hungry reptiles

Revenge of the 'Gator takes things back to 1989. Developed and published by HAL Laboratory before the studio created Kirby, it was an early proving ground for portable ball physics from the engineering-heavy team where Satoru Iwata made his name.

Instead of scrolling smoothly across one giant table, the layout is split into four main stacked screens bordered by three bonus stages, all populated by chomping alligators that act as bumpers, targets, and drains when your ball drops past the bottom flippers. Reviewers at the time gave it high marks for crisp ball visibility on the original dot-matrix display and its two-player alternating link-cable modes. You can draw a straight line from the table design here to HAL's later work on Kirby's Pinball Land (1993) and Pokémon Pinball (1999).

Body-hopping through a 1992 crime syndicate

Rounding out the October 27 drop is Avenging Spirit, a 1992 Game Boy conversion of C.P. Brain and Jaleco's 1991 arcade platformer (known as Phantasm in Japan, with rights now held by City Connection). The premise starts on a grim note: mobsters shoot your character dead in the opening cutscene and kidnap your girlfriend to force her father into researching ghost energy.

Rather than moving on to the afterlife, you float around as a vengeful phantom who can possess roughly 20 different types of syndicate goons, from baseball-cap street punks and flamethrower troopers to karate masters and dragons, using their weapons to fight through six side-scrolling stages before your host body takes too much damage and kicks you back out into ghost form. Being kicked out isn't an instant game over, though your spirit energy ticks down fast until you hijack a new body.

Contemporary reviews appreciated how closely the handheld port kept the arcade original's body-swapping gimmick intact on a tiny screen. Loose original cartridges of Avenging Spirit regularly sell for triple digits on the collector market, and while City Connection released a standalone port of the arcade version for modern consoles in 2022, this 8-bit adaptation plays quite differently due to its reconfigured stages. Between this trio and the three Game Boy Advance titles added on October 14 (Monster Rancher Advance, Metal Slug Advance, and Kururin Paradise), October has turned into a busy month for Nintendo's portable catalog.