Following on from the release and subsequent pulling of Super Mario Bros 35 — Nintendo’s latest surreal take on the Battle Royale craze, albeit with arguably its biggest IP — last month, it seems that we’re not done with fixing high numbers onto popular, historic and much-beloved video game properties. Making what is at the very least a sudden announcement and subsequent release today, Pac-Man 99 finds one of Bandai Namco’s own old, treasured IP’s getting the “99” treatment on Nintendo Switch. In much the same vain as 2019’s Tetris 99 brought, Pac-Man 99 finds players competing against 98 fellow players online in a round of classic Pac-Man. Ghosts and power-pellets all accounted for.

Similar to how Tetris 99 usually played out, players must make split-second decisions on how much (or little) they want to go about attacking nearby players. All while avoiding the many attacks that head their way in the form of both Jammer Pac-Man — which slow one’s speed — as well as additional Ghosts to avoid. Acquiring a power pellet in this case, not only allowing players to send that same offensive back, but also allowing them to adapt to the escalating events in the form of power-up’s.

Pac-Man 99 will release as a stand-alone online mode for free for anyone with a Nintendo Switch Online membership, but there will also be a $30 paid bundle for the game. The bundle appearing to include a bevvy of additional modes that the free base version doesn’t have, such as an offline CPU mode, private matches, time-attack challenges and more. While a lot of this same content did eventually make its way to Tetris 99, it’s unclear yet whether this too will make its way into the free version of Pac-Man 99 at a later date, or is in fact locked behind that $30 paywall.