Last week, Bandai Namco announced Pac-Man: Championship Edition (Famicom Arrange Version) as a bonus title for Namcot Collection on Switch.

As it turns out, this Famicom-style demake of 2007’s original Pac-Man: Championship Edition was planned for release a lot earlier, as an standalone title for the 3DS! In a post on Twitter, M2 director Naoki Horii explained how the Famicom Arrange Version of the title came to be, as well as what makes it different from the original release.

You can find a translation below, via Siliconera:

Now then… Our company is allowed to do everything we want. Regarding the extra Championship Edition game, it’s becoming something big to the point that I don’t want to call it an extra game.

Originally, this should be sold alone, right? So that as many people would play it as possible? That’s exactly the case, so we originally negotiated to port the game to Nintendo 3DS, and afterwards, we’ve been working on this for around nearly five years. When it was still just a 3DS port, we had already put a lot of effort into completely replacing the soundtrack, but for this game we’ve basically further replaced and remade many things even beyond just the soundtrack…! We worked hard to make this a Famicom game on Nintendo Switch where you can move to the rhythm of the music and the graphics.

While there are some people who knew about this project beforehand, I bet even they will still be surprised at the finished game! I really wanted to release this game no matter what, so I’m glad that we managed to do so even five years later!

Namcot Collection is scheduled to release on June 18 in Japan for Switch.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.