Nintendo Announces New “Before You Paid Rent” Subscription Service Featuring 90’s Remakes
Redmond, WA — Following the recent announcements of Star Fox (2026) and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (2026), Nintendo announced in a press release to Commander’s Herald’s new, extremely understaffed video games division that they will both be a part of the new “Nintendo: Before You Paid Rent” nostalgia subscription alongside Link’s Awakening (2019). The new service promises to capture the feeling of what it felt like when you didn’t have any money and didn’t know what income tax was, instead of now when you don’t have any money and wish that your income tax wasn’t being used to build sports stadiums on the front lawn of historically important federal buildings.
The subscription service will be the fourth tier of the Nintendo Switch Online service, after the base subscription, Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack, and Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack + That Caveman Tower Building Game That We Never Got Around To Naming Because I Don’t Think We Ever Technically Announced It. Although it will only launch with Link’s Awakening, Star Fox, and Ocarina of Time, more games will be announced every 6 months or so, long after you’ve paid enough money into the sub to be able to buy the games several times over.
Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion + Caveman Game + Before You Paid Rent: Endless empty summers with nothing to do not included
Although Nintendo didn’t announce any more titles that will be coming to the service, numerous leaks have already hit social media and forums. Anonymous 4chan User With A Vaguely Recognizable Tripcode claims that the first games to come will be modern remakes of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards and Pilotwings, while MyNephewWorksAtNintendo on ResetEra corroborates this and adds that the third game to be announced will be a remake of Wave Race. Geoff Burg of Massivefailure claims through insiders that both the 4chan and ResetEra users are morons and that the first game to be announced will be a remake of Mario 64 made by a single guy in his basement by just importing assets into Unreal.
NoA President Devon Pritchard tells us that these will support their “Let Indies Do It For Us” method that they started in 2017 with Metroid: Samus Returns. “Yeah, we just got sick of the constant inundation of people wanting us to remake the games from their childhoods, so we just said ‘Fuck it’ and told MercurySteam to just do it for us. Turns out that was a smart move, because we could just focus on making new stuff while everyone went crazy for the Metroid game by the Spaniards that we put our name on. Even got them to make another one! Suckers. So we did it again with Grezzo on Link’s Awakening, and are doing it again with Velan Studios on Star Fox and whoever we roped in on Ocarina, I forget. It’s like printing free money and goodwill, it kicks ass!”
Although you’ll be able to subscribe to the NSO tier with any version of Switch, Star Fox and Ocarina will only be available on Switch 2 when they release, and you’ll probably be too lazy to unsub when you realize you messed it up.
