Nintendo seems to have been keeping busy on their battle royale games.
Of course, Nintendo doesn’t have a Fortnite, and Splatoon isn’t a live service game yet. We’re talking about Tetris 99 and F-Zero 99, two online titles that come bundled in with the Nintendo Switch Online subscription. As many fans can attest to, Nintendo’s way of making arcade style games modern with their own idea of making them battle royales has proven incredibly successful.
Today Nintendo revealed on Twitter than Tetris 99 is getting a new Maximus Cup based on its sibling, F-Zero 99. From June 28 12 AM PT, to July 1, 2024, 11:59 PM PT, The F-Zero Maximus Cup will go live, giving players a chance to play on the F-Zero 99 stage theme, complete with a stage layout, music, and Tetriminoes designed around the F-Zero theme.
These Maximus Cups have evolved to become part of Nintendo’s marketing, but in earnest, it looked like they didn’t intend it to be that way initially. It’s simply convenient for Nintendo to use their own games as themes for these events, but Tetris 99 had become ubiquitous to Switch players that it ended up that way.
But there’s some activity going on for F-Zero 99 itself. As shared on Twitter by user Luigiblood/ Yakumono, the Japanese website for Nintendo has revealed that the game is set to receive update 1.4.0 next week. That update indicates that it will introduce special limited time events of their own to F-Zero 99.
The last F-Zero 99 update was published just last March, and included a host of must have improvements and new content. That included enabling mirrored versions of all tracks, a Steer Assist feature, a bigger Practice Mode and new Challenge Highlights.
One now does wonder if F-Zero 99’s time limited events to have their own themes in the same vein as Tetris 99. There are certainly some fun ideas that developers can explore with that idea. If this is what it is, the only right thing to do is to add a Tetris 99 theme to this game as well.
In its own way, these updates to these games also indicate that Nintendo doesn’t expect players to drop the game very soon. It certainly sounds like the upcoming console after the Switch will play Switch games like F-Zero 99 and Tetris 99. We may even see a future where updates will no longer come to the Switch for these games, but they will come to its successor. But in the meantime, Switch Online subscribers have a lot to look forward to in the coming weeks.