2 Canceled Nintendo Games Are Finally Releasing on Switch and Switch 2 After 30 Years

July 31, 2026, 5:00pm

A pair of video games that Nintendo canceled back in 1996 will finally be getting released on Switch and Switch 2 platforms within the coming week. Throughout its history, Nintendo has scrapped a variety of games for one reason or another. Some of these cancellations happened very close to the planned release dates for certain games, while others were killed off behind the scenes before the general public even knew they existed. Now, two titles that Nintendo previously canned are making a comeback that many longtime fans surely would have never anticipated.

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Set to arrive on August 4th, Zero Racers and Dragon Hopper (or D-Hopper, as it’s now being called) will be launching onto Nintendo’s Switch Online service. Originally slated to release 30 years ago, Zero Racers and Dragon Hopper were both planned to debut on Nintendo’s Virtual Boy hardware. However, given the monumental failure that the Virtual Boy ended up being from both a critical and commercial standpoint, Zero Racers and Dragon Hopper were each canceled after Nintendo opted to discontinue the hardware. Despite this, Zero Racers and Dragon Hopper were both essentially completed before their cancellation, which has led to Nintendo now bringing them back on Switch Online and its library of Virtual Boy titles.

Of these two games, Zero Racers is perhaps the most notable, as it’s actually part of the F-Zero franchise. Planned as a follow-up to the original F-Zero on SNES, Zero Racers features the franchise’s most popular character, Captain Falcon, alongside a handful of other familiar racers. While the F-Zero series would eventually make the jump to 3D graphics in F-Zero X on Nintendo 64, Zero Racers was technically the first game in the series to feature 3D environments for players to race in.

As for Dragon Hopper, it doesn’t stem from a well-known Nintendo series like Zero Racers does. Instead, the Intelligent Systems-developed title is set within a fantasy world where players control a prince who sets out on a journey to save fairies from an evil force. Dragon Hopper takes unique advantage of the Virtual Boy’s 3D functionality, as players can traverse upward or downward through floors that are layered on top of one another. The game is somewhat similar to the earliest entries in Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda franchise, with its biggest differences being its unique style of play that the Virtual Boy allows for.

If you’re looking to check out Zero Racers or Dragon Hopper for yourself, you’ll be able to do so next week when they drop on Nintendo Switch Online. As a reminder, Virtual Boy games on NSO are only playable to those subscribed to the Expansion Pack tier of the service, which means that anyone with a standard subscription won’t be able to jump in without first upgrading.