Pac-Man 99 Is a Free Pac-Man Battle Royale Available Now for Nintendo Switch Online Subscribers

Super Mario Bros. 35 might’ve gone to that big battle royale in the sky last week, but don’t fret: there’s now another game for the Switch that drops a beloved gaming icon into one of these new-fangled battle royales. And, once again, it’s free for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers.

Pac-Man 99 pits 99 players against each other in what, on the surface, seems like a good old-fashioned game of Pac-Man. There are a few crucial changes, though. When you eat ghosts, they pop up in your opponent’s mazes as a “Jammer Pac-Man”—basically a ghostly, spectral Pac-Man that slows your Pac-Man down whenever they touch. There are also chains of “sleeping ghosts,” and when you eat those they greatly increase the number of ghosts you can eat when you chomp a power pellet—which, in turn, increases the number of Jammer Pac-Men you spit at opponents. There are a few other wrinkles, too, that aim to retrofit the classic Pac experience for the massively head-to-head nature of a battle royale; hopefully it all works better than Super Mario Bros. 35 did.

If you want to see Pac-Man 99 in action, and get a brief overview of how it operates, check out this video that Nintendo posted to YouTube today. And if you have a Switch, and subscribe to Switch Online, you can download it and get chompin’ right now: it’s already up on the eShop.