Four fresh SNES games are coming to Nintendo Switch Online next week

Things have been quiet on the Nintendo Switch Online front ever since the company dropped 20 classic SNES games onto its wildly popular hybrid console's $20 a year subscription service back in September, but that's about to change. Four more SNES games and two fresh NES games are coming on Dec. 12, Nintendo revealed Wednesday.

The SNES selection includes Star Fox 2, Super Punch-Out, Kirby Super Star and Breath of Fire 2. The tale of Star Fox 2 is pretty fascinating: It was planned for a summer 1995 release but canned because Nintendo didn't want it to be overshadowed by Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. We finally got the chance to play it in 2017, when Nintendo hid it on the SNES Classic retro console.

If you want to go a bit more retro, the NES games -- action RPG Crystalis and sci-fi platformer Journey to Silius -- are both from 1990. The latter game was originally supposed to be a Terminator tie-in, but developer Sunsoft lost the rights.

Japanese subscribers get a different selection of games this time -- no Super Punch-Out, Breath of Fire 2, Crystalis or Journey to Silius in that region. Instead, people in Japan get NES games Famicom Wars and Route 16 Turbo.

On Thursday, Nintendo said it sold 830,000 Switches and Switch Lites in the US over Thanksgiving weekend. It also plans to launch the console in China -- a market of 1.3 billion people -- on Dec. 10.

First published at 3:27 a.m. PT.
Updated at 4:09 a.m. PT: Adds more detail.