Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech



The Nintendo Switch may not have a full-blown Virtual Console collection yet, but its eShop has a few emulated classics already. This week, fans finally noticed that its current, small slate of '80s and '90s games had a surprise tucked inside ever since the system's launch: a vertical orientation option.

The only classic games available for purchase on the Switch's eShop come from the Neo-Geo system, and this week's launch of Neo Turf Masters should have gone by as a minor blip. This title wasn't a major Neo-Geo hit, nor a rare curio. But for whatever reason, this game, as opposed to the other Neo-Geo games launched thus far, got someone to post video of the emulator's "display settings menu."

This revealed an "orientation of the display" option, which one user at Reddit then tested. The option allowed this redditor to rotate the game's image in 90 degree chunks. I wanted to dig deeper into this, so I purchased Metal Slug 3, another Neo-Geo game port from rights owner Hamster Co. Sure enough, it had the same "orientation of the display" option. Hamster Co. may have inserted this into every Neo-Geo game it has ported; they all share the same menu structure, so it's possible, but I have yet to purchase every Neo-Geo re-release to confirm.

At any rate, what's the big deal? Pixel preservation, that's what. Arcade fanatics will tell you that some of the best games ever made, from classics like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong to newer shoot-'em-ups like Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun, shipped with vertical screen ratios. In the old days, this was as simple as turning a standard 288x244 resolution screen to its side, thus giving games a 7:9 ratio to work with. But porting to home systems, which were designed for average 4:3 TV sets, meant classic games got squished and converted to adapt. (This is also why HD collections of games tend to fill the sides of their screens with lush artwork, to distract from how those games waste a wider 16:9 ratio display.)

The Switch, with its 6.2" screen and easily removable controllers, offers a better use case for vertical mode than any recent system in history. The default hardware doesn't ship with any ideal way to prop the system up vertically, of course, but resting it at an angle against a surface is still easier than having to do the same with a TV 32" or larger (which HD remasters of games like Ikaruga supported, at least). As you may notice in the above images, I used my official Nintendo carrying case to neatly and securely prop my Switch up, which is another reason why I like the $20 case so much.

To preserve the exact, original resolution of games like Pac-Man on the Switch's rotated 720p screen, developers would still need to employ some trickery by either slicing pixels off the left and right or using some potentially blurry pixel scaling. But either of those compromises would produce a far more handsome portable-retro viewing experience than slapping a tall, skinny Pac-Man board into the middle of the current 16:9 panel.

None of the Neo-Geo games released thus far make particularly good use of a vertical orientation, which may be why the feature has gone unnoticed for nearly a month. And this mode's discovery doesn't mean we should expect game makers to embrace the vertical-orientation option and incite wrath from Switch owners who do a bad job angling their systems in a safe manner. (I imagine the controller-strap and Wii-condom lovers at Nintendo will be the last company to release a classic game this way.) But it does confirm something interesting: Nintendo tested this software and let it launch without any finger-wagging. This presumably means any game maker can do the same thing for future games if they so please, just like they can tell TV-mode players to cram it with a "portable-only" restriction.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech