We have a new rumor about the often rumored Nintendo Switch 2, but you might not like what we have to tell you here.
In the latest episode of the Xboxera podcast, the hosts share a rumor that they had apparently known about for a little bit of time. This time, Shpeshal Nick seemed to have shared the rumor with Jesse, or Jesse found out first, because they had both indicated they already knew what this was before revealing it.
The rumor is that there will be two different versions of the Switch 2 console. One of them will have backwards compatibility, and one will not. The Xboxera hosts don’t have more information, but we can make some reasonable speculation on how they can do this, by looking at how Nintendo did backwards compatibility in their prior consoles.
Nintendo originally did not plan for their consoles to have backwards compatibility. This led to a very real resistance in the 1990s, when parents refused to upgrade their kids’ consoles from the NES system to the SNES.
However, when it came to Game Boy, Nintendo saw a reason to change direction. Nintendo saw the Game Boy as a platform that could literally move across continents, and the potential for gamers to share the hardware around the world. For this reason, the Game Boy was region free.
This was also the reasoning behind Nintendo making the Game Boy Color compatible with Game Boy games, and the Game Boy Advance compatible with Game Boy Color and Game Boy games. The Game Boy was different because it was a portable, and that was bolstered by the platform’s success around the world, reaching places Nintendo did not officially sell their products.
Here’s where this gets interesting. The Game Boy Color was slightly upgraded hardware from the Game Boy. For this reason, some games published for the Game Boy Color can be played on the original Game Boy, with the color gone, of course.
The Game Boy Advance was significantly different than either the Game Boy Color or the Game Boy. To keep backwards compatibility going, Nintendo actually put in the necessary original Game Boy Color components in the Game Boy Advance. Gamers didn’t know it, but the Game Boy Advance was actually two consoles.
And we can confirm this because the Game Boy Micro exists. That considerably smaller console is made of the actual original parts of the Game Boy Advance. The Game Boy Micro cannot play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.
Nintendo maintained backwards compatibility across different consoles in this exact same way, such as the Wii and the Wii U, and the DS and the 3DS. So it’s highly possible that the Switch 2, which is already rumored to be much more powerful than the original Switch, will also be made of significantly different hardware than the original Switch.
Based on their previous track record, there will be other interesting aspects to these two Switch 2 models as well. For example, the one without backwards compatibility will have less hardware, and could potentially be lighter and even smaller, just like the Game Boy Micro.
It will be interesting to see if these rumors do come to fruition.
