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Donkey Kong 64 is finally being added to Nintendo Switch Online, so now you can experience his first ever 3D platformer on a handheld.
Despite being intrinsically linked to the great ape, Rare actually didn't spend that much time with Donkey Kong. Between 1994 and 1999, the Donkey Kong Country trilogy rebooted the whole franchise, the Donkey Kong Land games adapted those to Game Boy, and then finally the studio took what it learned with Banjo-Kazooie to make a 3D platformer (also Diddy Kong Racing, too, I didn't forget). And while the Country games have been on Nintendo Switch Online since the service launched in 2021, Donkey Kong 64 has been one of the biggest omissions from the N64 library.
And out of nowhere, Nintendo confirmed that yes, finally, Rare's 1999 platformer will be coming to Nintendo Switch Online's N64 library on June 4, 2026 – almost exactly one year after the Switch 2 launched. And now you can finally experience Donkey Kong 64 with save states and a rewind feature, which should hopefully cut down on how unfathomably tedious of a game it can be.
While it has its fans for sure, Donkey Kong 64 took Rare's collectathon style from Banjo-Kazooie to the absolute extremes, with each level having a ton of collectibles to grab and five sets of them to correspond to each playable character. And for those playable characters, you have to backtrack to a barrel within the level to manually switch them – and it's no surprise that one of the most popular mods for it is the ability to switch on the fly, which will obviously not be included in this version.
To this very day, the game holds a Guinness World Record for most collectible items in a platformer game; it's an absolute beast. And while Donkey Kong Bananza is the better game for a multitude of different reasons, I'd still recommend trying this one out to take in the sheer amount of it. Plus, it gave us the DK Rap, so it can't all be bad.
