An Overlooked NES Classic Is Back on Nintendo Hardware After 36 Years

By Garrett Martin | February 22, 2024 | 6:50pm

Video Games Features R.C. Pro-Am

An Overlooked NES Classic Is Back on Nintendo Hardware After 36 Years

Five games from the ‘80s and ‘90s were added to Nintendo Switch Online yesterday. It’s great news for all the old Nintendo heads out there, especially ones partial to Rare, the British studio that made some of the most popular games on Nintendo consoles during a relationship that spanned 17 years (eight of which saw Rare outright owned by Nintendo). Five Rare games across three different consoles are now available to Switch Online subscribers, from Super Nintendo games in the Battletoads and Killer Instinct franchises, to the cult favorite Nintendo 64 game Blast Corps. Most importantly—and kind of lost in most of the media coverage of the new additions—is the return of R.C. Pro-Am to Nintendo hardware. The games media kind of slept on this a bit, but this is one of the most important releases yet for Nintendo Switch Online.

R.C. Pro-Am, which was developed by Rare but published by Nintendo, was a crucial game for the NES in 1988. The remote control car racer was hyped in Nintendo Fun Club News, Nintendo’s in-house precursor to Nintendo Power, before its release, and often written about across the first few issues of Power. By 1988 the NES market was flourishing and it was impossible to keep up with every new game, and Nintendo’s marketing push helped R.C. Pro-Am cut through the clutter and become one of those games that everyone was familiar with. If you didn’t own it, you probably played it at a friend’s house, or at least rented it. It made a deep impression on players at the time, one that persists to this day; it came in at #34 on our list of the best NES games, while a previous Paste games editor, Jason Killingsworth, called it the eighth best game for the system in an earlier version of that list. It plays very differently from Mario Kart, but in a pre-Mario Kart world, R.C. Pro-Am was the party game racer for Nintendo fans.

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Nintendo pushed it hard through their in-house publications, but that alone couldn’t make a game a hit, much less one that became as big and beloved as R.C. Pro-Am. Kids flocked to it because it was a genuinely great game, one that was especially fun to play with friends. If you couldn’t tell by the remote control car theme, it doesn’t take racing too seriously, and has a slightly cartoonish aesthetic that’s warm and inviting. Its use of in-race power-ups and hazards keeps things interesting and competitive, while permanent upgrades give players a sense of progress from race to race. Races are also really short, which can easily hook a player into one of those hard-to-break “just one more” loops. (Seriously, I had a brief R.C. Pro-Am resurgence in college, and I had to stop because I’d regularly find myself staying up deep into the early hours of the morning just racing against the computer.) And perhaps the most crucial part of its success, beyond even how fun it is, is that it’s almost impossible to not understand this game. At a time when games were still relatively new and even regular players hadn’t yet internalized gaming skills or literacy, R.C. Pro-Am was as clear and obvious as a stop sign. Anybody who had ever picked up the NES controller before would immediately understand how to play it.

R.C. Pro-Am on Nintendo Switch

So here we have one of the most successful games from Nintendo’s golden era, from the system that basically saved the idea of home consoles in America, from the peak of Nintendo’s dominance of the industry, finally landing on the Switch. And it’s a game that was actually published by Nintendo, which, to players in the ‘80s, meant it was just as much of a “Nintendo game” as Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda. (We didn’t really get the whole first-party, second-party, third-party thing back then, okay?) On top of all that, due to the nature of Rare and Nintendo’s relationship when it was published—Rare was still independent and wouldn’t be bought by Nintendo until 1994, meaning Rare owned R.C. Pro-Am—and their relationship over the last 22 years—Nintendo sold Rare to Microsoft in 2002, making Rare and most of their games, past and present, exclusive to the Xbox—this defining game of the NES was never rereleased on any Nintendo system. It didn’t get a Classic NES Series release on the Game Boy Advance, or show up in any of the digital stores for the Wii, 3DS, or Wii U, or appear on the NES Classic microconsole. If you weren’t there at the time, you’d probably have no idea how significant a game this was for the NES, because the nature of corporate ownership prevented its legacy from being honored (or exploited) in the traditional ways. (A Game Boy sequel came out in 1991, true, along with an NES sequel published by Tradewest in 1993, but neither were met with anything close to the acclaim or success of the original.)

That’s why I wasn’t too surprised that there wasn’t more of a reaction to yesterday’s Switch Online news. If you weren’t there, you don’t know. I’m not sure exactly when we hit the point where most members of the games press are too young to have played the NES in its day, but it’s been clear for years, and coverage of yesterday’s update was a reminder. Most articles led with the arrival of Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, Killer Instinct, and Blast Corps. They’re all fine games—Blast Corps is great, even—but to me, and, I think, to most people my age, R.C. Pro-Am getting released on Nintendo hardware for the first time in 36 years is the true headline here. With no effort to regularly introduce new players to the game over the years, though, or to highlight how prominent it was in its day—no occasional sequels, no references in Super Smash Bros.—its reputation wasn’t passed on to subsequent generations. Hopefully that’ll change now that it’s once again playable on a Nintendo system.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.