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The NES Classic’s time on shelves is coming to an end

By Cheryl Wassenaar

Still from NES Classic Edition trailer. Image via Nintendo.
Still from NES Classic Edition trailer. Image via Nintendo. /
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Hopefully you have an NES Classic already, because if you found it difficult to get one, it’s about to get absolutely impossible.

Let’s face it: the NES Classic from Nintendo is effectively a $60 nostalgia machine that fits in the palm of your hand. But for that $60, assuming you actually bought it at retail price and not from a scalper, you get 30 games ranging from Final Fantasy to Mega Man 2 to, of course, The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. Controller cord lengths aside, it’s a very nice addition to a collection … and it’s about to become even more of a collector’s item.

According to IGN, April will be the last month that stores will get shipments, and that’s it. Nintendo will not continue making NES Classic Editions.

This is a system that even as late as last month was contributing to a massive slowdown of Best Buy’s website, enough that it sent people to Twitter to be very angry about it. Granted, Best Buy had also restocked the Nintendo Switch, but it seemed at the time that people had been trying to also get the NES Classic.

As IGN reports, the NES Classic went on sale in November of last year, but, as they note and in this writer’s own experience, it was far more common to see empty shelves with the marker for the system rather than the actual box.

So why is Nintendo doing it? IGN quotes a representative as saying it “wasn’t intended to be an ongoing, long-term product,” which … doesn’t make a lot of sense. Unless production costs ended up higher than expected, what’s stopping Nintendo from continuing to make money off of games that are somewhere in the range of 30 years old like this? It might entice people back to the Virtual Console services of the Wii U and Switch. However, the latter doesn’t quite exist yet. Could this mean that we’ll have a Switch Virtual Console sooner rather than later?

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Either way, should you already have an NES Classic, count yourself among the lucky ones, because the last shipments will be in even higher demand now.