Super Mario Sunshine Joins Switch Online on August 13

Nintendo announced a two-part Switch Online drop on July 31 that does something genuinely rare: it makes a previously stranded Mario game easy to play again, and it rescues two Virtual Boy titles that never shipped at all. Super Mario Sunshine lands in the GameCube library on August 13, and on August 4, D-Hopper and Zero Racers arrive on the Virtual Boy service.

• Super Mario Sunshine joins the GameCube library August 13, its first easy availability since the discontinued 3D All-Stars collection
• D-Hopper and Zero Racers arrive August 4 — Zero Racers is a completed F-Zero spin-off that was never commercially released
• Virtual Boy titles gain customizable screen colour, a previously announced feature
• Most of the Virtual Boy library is now on the service, with eight titles still held back by IP licensing

Why Is Super Mario Sunshine Such a Big Deal?

Because it has been genuinely hard to play legitimately. Sunshine's most recent re-release was inside Super Mario 3D All-Stars, a collection Nintendo pulled from sale — which left one of the more distinctive 3D Mario games in an awkward limbo where the only options were original GameCube hardware or the secondhand market at collector prices.

Dropping it into the Switch Online GameCube library fixes that in the simplest possible way. Sunshine is the Mario game with the water jetpack, Isle Delfino's holiday-resort setting, and a physics-driven movement system that people either adore or bounce off entirely. It is a good candidate for rediscovery precisely because it is the odd one out in the 3D Mario lineage — and a subscription is a much easier way to find out which camp you fall into than tracking down a disc.

What Is Zero Racers, and Why Has Nobody Played It?

This is the more remarkable half of the announcement. Zero Racers is an F-Zero spin-off built for the Virtual Boy that was, by all accounts, finished — and then never released, as the Virtual Boy's commercial life ended before it could ship. It has existed for three decades as a piece of gaming history people could read about but not play.

D-Hopper joins it on August 4, and both benefit from the previously announced screen colour customization for Virtual Boy titles, which softens the system's famously monochrome red display into something considerably easier on the eyes.

VGC notes that the majority of the Virtual Boy library is now on the service. Eight titles remain unavailable, largely due to licensing on the properties they are built around — Gundam and Waterworld among them. That is a genuinely respectable preservation record for a console that shipped fewer than two dozen games in its short life.

A Good Month for Nintendo Preservation

What makes this drop stand out is that both halves solve a preservation problem rather than simply padding a catalogue. Sunshine was commercially stranded; Zero Racers was never available at all. Making both playable through a subscription is the kind of archival work that keeps games from quietly disappearing.

It has been a strong stretch for the platform generally — Splatoon Raiders topped Japan's physical charts in late July, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2's Switch 2 Edition added a 4K60 mode. But a thirty-year-old unreleased F-Zero racer becoming playable for the first time is a different kind of win. More in our gaming coverage.

Sources: Video Games Chronicle — July 31, 2026; Nintendo — accessed August 2, 2026.