[**Nintendo Switch 5-Year Timeline**](https://imgur.com/wAjgwJD) (more sizes down below)
The Nintendo Switch celebrates its fifth birthday on Thursday, March 3, and I wanted to prepare something special for the occasion. What follows are a timeline showing every game to get a Metacritic score of 75 or over along a timeline showing when it released (based on its US release date). I thought this might be a fun way to visually track the highs and lows of the Nintendo Switch’s first five years.
A few notes, first. Nintendo-platform exclusives are highlighted with a red border. This means games that are also on the GameCube, Wii, Wii U, DS, and 3DS are highlighted, but games that also appear on PC, mobile devices, Xbox, and PlayStation platforms do not. I am looking at their *current* exclusivity, not exclusivity at launch – Monster Hunter Rise is no longer exclusive, for example.
Also, to head off the question, “Why Metacritic?”, I picked it because there’s not really any good objective way to highlight the best games on Nintendo Switch, and this seemed like the closest thing to an objective way of doing this (without just showing a jumble of *ALL* of the games on the Switch). There are *absolutely* games listed here that I don’t feel deserve the praise they got, and games that *aren’t* here that I believe should be, but I’m trying to keep my personal feelings out of this.
I have not listed DLC or expansions here, save for Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna, which was released as a standalone in addition to its release as an expansion. I have not listed re-releases (like Snipperclips Plus or Sonic Mania Plus), and have only listed compilations if their included games aren’t all represented elsewhere on the list (For example, even though Resident Evil Revelations is listed here, Resident Evil Revelations Collection also makes the cut because it includes Resident Evil Revelations 2, which *isn’t* listed here).
I will be including a full list of the games shown here down in the comments. By my count there are 917 games total: 119 in year one, 232 in year two, 200 in year three, 192 in year four, and 174 in year five.
If I made a mistake here, accidentally missed a game, put it in the wrong spot, or got the highlighting of exclusives wrong, you can feel free to say so in the comments, but I don’t think I’ll be going back to fix it – this took quite a lot of work to put together, and now I feel like I’m *done*. Likewise, I know that at the higher resolutions, the Metacritic scores and the Nintendo Switch logo look fuzzy. Nobody’s perfect.
I have included multiple sizes depending on your screen size and resolution. Be aware that the largest sizes here are absolutely *massive*, so you may want to start with the smallest sizes and work your way up.
**Nintendo Switch 5-Year Timeline** – [1200-pixel Height](https://imgur.com/wAjgwJD), [1080-pixel Height](https://imgur.com/eMC4FKX), [4K Display Size](https://imgur.com/mGD59Fj)
**Nintendo Switch 5-Year Timeline (Vertical Alignment)** – [1920-pixel Width](https://imgur.com/6lZRAXo), [3840-pixel Width](https://imgur.com/1rcyGAR)
**Year One** – [1920 x 1200](https://imgur.com/cgzRUUb), [For 4K Displays](https://imgur.com/ZeN6Ss7), [Full Size](https://imgur.com/UCKXhZh)
**Year Two** – [1920 x 1200](https://imgur.com/5kAe4de), [For 4K Displays](https://imgur.com/Ilm9kgf), [Full Size](https://imgur.com/kfu27Fd)
**Year Three** – [1920 x 1200](https://imgur.com/AQc2Uqb), [For 4K Displays](https://imgur.com/WzYK4U3), [Full Size](https://imgur.com/yKRKw99)
**Year Four** – [1920 x 1200](https://imgur.com/tvyxKR3), [For 4K Displays](https://imgur.com/lHHKY9s), [Full Size](https://imgur.com/GTrTO4l)
**Year Five** – [1920 x 1200](https://imgur.com/X7nFKeb), [For 4K Displays](https://imgur.com/Dzf3OiL), [Full Size](https://imgur.com/5dUJjUx)
[**Full Album**](https://imgur.com/a/h47ukF1)
Anyway, I hope you all find this interesting!