An exploration and evaluation of the 250+ retro video games available as part of the Nintendo Switch Online catalog

Jamyo and I first became friends over three decades ago in elementary school, and it's a friendship that has always involved gaming, from me having an Atari 2600, to him having a Sega Genesis, and a Sega Saturn, and a Sega Dreamcast, and a Nintendo 64, and... well, it continued like that. Jaymo was always a console gamer, while I was more of a PC gamer. Those interests in games continued as we moved on to careers, him in teaching and myself in science.

In each episode of The Old Switch-a-roo: Gaming Retro w/ Mike and Jaymo we focus on the retro games that are included with the Nintendo Switch Online service (NES, SNES, Gameboy, N64, and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive); that's currently a library of over 250 games. Some we are revisiting and others we're playing for the first time. On this quest we're joined by both old and new friends as we decide which games are the NintenDOs worth checking out and which games are the NintenDON'Ts that either aged poorly or were never good and aren't worth playing.
 

If there's any single influence at the root of The Old Switch-a-roo, it's the Ultra 64 podcast, which explored every game on the Nintendo 64 over its 5 year run. It was Jaymo's favorite podcast. When he couldn't really find a podcast that was exploring the Nintendo Switch Online catalog (a service we've come to think is woefully underappreciated), and after Nintendo Switch Online added the Nintendo 64 classic Goldeneye in a move that motivated me to buy a Switch in early 2023, he then pitched the idea of doing a podcast exploring all the offerings on the service, from the most well-regarded to the most forgotten.

For us, this is a journey through games that we remember, games we wanted to play and never got to, and games we've never heard of. Along the way, we'd like to start to find a community of others who appreciate these old games and enjoy exploring that library with us. Part of the fun of this has certainly also been who we're able to bring on, not just Jaymo's brothers or my wife and friends we talk to frequently, but also how this has helped provide a basis to reconnect with some people we've brought on in the first season and some of the new people we've met and had on thanks to this show during season two as we've done more collaboration with other podcasters and streamers.

We recorded our first episode at the end of April 2023, and then spent the next couple months working on getting things set up, including getting several more episodes recorded so that when we launched the podcast in mid-August of that year (4 months later), we were able to release three episodes and had the next couple episodes ready to go so that we'd have some momentum.
 

Podcast production is balanced around both that I travel somewhat for my job and that Jaymo's got a very heavy load at points of the year as a teacher. To accommodate all that, the balance we settled on was to release episodes every two weeks. With a show that is 1-2 hours, we probably spend 2-3 hours recording and I spend roughly double the episode length on the audio edit and a handful more hours each episode go into YouTube videos that Jaymo puts together using a combination of still images and gameplay footage.

That's really only half the process, though, as before we can record, the prep work involves research into each game's history on Jaymo's part, and he and I both try to play the games beforehand. Truth be told, he's probably playing a fair bit more than I am, but I suspect I average something around half a dozen hours of gaming per episode. I usually don't beat the games, but Jaymo plays enough to reach the end of a significant portion of the games we've played for the podcast.

We deliberately marked a season one end and then had less heavy episodes, our Lite Switch episodes, between the end of season one and the start of season two. In those episodes, we just talked about the games we'd played in the last two weeks, so there wasn't any preparation necessary and it allowed us to have a somewhat quieter month or so that when we start season 2 we have decent coverage in case life gets in the way so we don't miss a release.

The podcast is currently self-funded; our present podcast host is Spotify, so that doesn't cost us anything, and we're using open-source editing tools, but we do have web hosting and web page creation through Podpage, and pay for Opus.pro to automatically create video clips that collectively add up to a few hundred dollars a year currently. I've experimented a little with paid advertising, but nothing has seemed to have a worthwhile return of investment so far.
 

Currently, we don't have any sponsorships, though we continue to think we're probably doing Nintendo more good than harm and think they could probably benefit if they were to boost us a bit. It would be nice to get to a point where the podcast is revenue neutral, or where we could have something to reinvest in the podcast that would free up our time from some of the editing and marketing tasks.

Still, there have been benefits even if they aren't financial ones. I've certainly gotten a lot more comfortable with speaking, and as someone fairly introverted I've also really enjoyed that this has provided something to motivate me to reach out to people I already do know, and also to reach out to those I don't. As a part-time film buff, it's also given me a bit of an excuse to do some collaborative stuff with film podcasters and talk about films that I enjoy and that's been a blast (Japan on Film, Underrated movie podcast, Operation: Silver Screen). In our season one finale, Jaymo also talked about how one of the things that he'd enjoyed was how he felt this was connecting him with new friends, and that has certainly encouraged us to view Season Two as an opportunity to have more people on than we did in Season One, both for better conversations when we're recording and making more human connections for when we are not recording, and we're looking forward to being able to release episodes with hosts from other podcasts like Smashing Game Time, Arcadiology, and the Underrated movie podcast.

Along the way, we've also been motivated to check out a lot of games that we hadn't played before and we've both found some games we really enjoyed but had overlooked up until this point. So the journey itself has been worthwhile, on top of the fun of talking about it.
 

Our personal preparation for each show is primarily in playing the games, and Jaymo's research into the history of each game (as he channels his day job of teaching for that). The guests initially started with just friends and family that had interests in particular games, but our future guests have really started to expand from making connections with other podcasters (some because they're also in situations looking for guests) and also from starting to get a bit more plugged in to Twitch streamers that I have connections to and getting to know them, so it's starting to help us look a bit further afield to find people who can join us, especially people who can come in with a nostalgic enthusiasm for some of the games we are playing.

We record using zoom, primarily because zoom allows us to record multitrack audio and it's a service we already have access to, and using AudioPro microphones, at least for Jaymo and myself. I then do the audio editing in Audacity. That audio is combined with things like gameplay footage using OpenShot Video Editor for our YouTube-specific content as we're audio only everywhere else.

We're still in the process of getting full transcripts as it's very time intensive to proof them, but we use Eddy by Headliner to get transcripts. Even the raw time-stamped transcripts are really useful for preparing the videos, and we've been experimenting with some of the other services from Headliner, like audiograms or generating AI show notes (During Lite Switch, we tried using the AI show notes as well as some AI images for the YouTube thumbnails, and it at least seemed to save some time if nothing else)
 

Marketing the show has felt like a real uphill battle, in no small part because I'm not a huge social media user (it largely reflects people I know in person) and Jaymo has been off social media for the better part of a decade. So we were starting off with very limited reach (and Facebook is really bad at actually sharing things to one's friends, as I've found). Especially with gaming in general being such a crowded field, even though I think we have an interesting niche it's been tough to get people to find out about us in the first place. It does seem like I've had the most luck with Discord and some of our guests, and that's largely because it seems like gaming-based discord servers tied to twitch are fairly open to long content about games. But it's not really in my nature to aggressively self-promote. While we've seen occasional small successes on TikTok or YouTube shorts, it's hard to get those viewers to switch over to podcasts. Social media and email lists all try to work on getting a large number of people that you can convert to listeners, but starting without those it feels just as challenging, if not moreso, to try to build up those resources to try to create listeners.

We do know that our listener base is fairly split up, with just over a third of our listens coming from Apple, just over a third coming from Spotify, and then the rest are divided up over smaller players or through browsers (which our website supports).
 

The simplest thing I learned was that it's worth putting the podcast out onto every service you can, as in most cases it's an easy one-time setup, and so it only needs doing once. And I've learned a bit more from my own increased listening that a podcast not being available on the app I use (Pocket Casts) often means I don't bother checking it out. Similarly, anything that I can do at once to avoid having to do something multiple times in the future is the kind of thing that pays off in the long run, like finding tools to push clips to social media so that I'm not trying to manage 5 social media accounts at once.

One of the more disappointing lessons along the way has been just how much basic discoverability is dictated by algorithms.

Especially for long-form content, a lot of this feels like you have to be at least fairly well-known in order to be discovered, and guides for the road from 0 downloads an episode to 100 downloads an episode often presuppose a lot more resources than we started out with, or a lot of work that's not directly related to the podcast to build up a name.

I have had two major resources that have helped, however. The first was that our web page host, Podpage, has had a few sessions focused on search engine optimization and how to increase website discoverability with the Clarity Creative Group and those have been very informative about how to adapt to an algorithm-driven landscape.

The second has been Podcast Marketing Trends Explained, and while some of their advice on what to do has been out of the reach of a hobbyist podcast like ours, they have been really helpful in providing a data-based idea of what sort of expectations we can have and also helping prioritize things so that the time I'm putting into this can be going into things that are most likely to have an impact. It's really difficult to decide which things to put effort into, and so that podcast helped me greatly in that regard.
 

The best one-stop shop for us is www.theoldswitcharoo.com as that has pages for all our episodes (and we're in the process of getting cleaned-up transcripts for those episodes as well), a blog, information about our guests, the list of games we've covered, and a write-up that gets occasionally updated of the services that we're using in slightly more detail than I've gone into here. It also has links to all our social media accounts.

We've worked hard to also make sure that our podcast is available just about anywhere anyone would look, so if there's a directory we could be in, but aren't, I'd want to know about it.