Somehow, Nintendo’s NES Classic Edition console is already almost eight years old, while the Super Nintendo Classic Edition is about to turn seven. That’s apparently old enough for Nintendo to announce that the Japanese versions of the consoles — the Nintendo Classic Mini Family Computer and the Nintendo Classic Mini Super Famicom — will no longer be eligible for repair once Nintendo Japan’s current stock of parts runs out.
That doesn’t mean that if you wake up tomorrow morning with a mini Famicom that won’t boot you’re out of luck. Nintendo Japan will continue to accept repairs but is warning users that it doesn’t have a definitive timeline for how long that will be the case. Nintendo Japan announced its plan to end repairs of the 12-year-old Wii U in May of 2023 but didn’t actually run out of parts and stop accepting units for repair until July of 2024.
The timeline could be shorter for these consoles. Although the relatively unpopular Wii U sold even fewer units than the GameCube, Nintendo still managed to make and move over 13 million of them. However, the company limited the availability of its Classic Edition consoles, and although they frequently sold out, there were fewer of them manufactured, which could result in a much smaller stockpile of spare parts.
The Classic Edition consoles were miniature replicas of the NES and SNES that played a collection of retro games from each original system through software emulation. They opened the floodgates for other retro mini consoles, including the superior Sega Genesis Mini and the TurboGrafx-16 Mini.
Nintendo of America’s support pages don’t say that it plans to discontinue repair services for the NES or SNES Classic Edition consoles, but we have reached out to Nintendo to confirm and will update this post if it does.
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