That is so cool.  I hate ice climbers, but i'd love this to be included in the other NES games that use multiplayer.  Gives me great hope for more virtual console stuff/pokemon.

I meant to ask about this! I'm a little surprised this has download play, seems a little generous from Nintendo, but I'm looking forward to the EU update!

I also hope this happens for balloon fight!

I'm really hoping they can maaybe hack in wireless multiplayer for Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, but Ice Climbers is a good start.

"It is not currently known if other games will get similar treatment."

Um... They announced almost a year ago, when the Ambassador Program was first revealed, that the NES games would eventually each be released to general public via the eShop along with an update that would include restore points and multiplayer support.

Prior to this point, no other NES game that's received its update originally supported 2 players at once. Ice Climber is the first one, and "surprise, surprise"-- it supports multiplayer just as they originally said. I'd consider that a pretty concrete enough indication that the other two multiplayer NES games (Balloon Fight and Yoshi) will have the same treatment.

Sadly, unless Nintendo changes its plans, they won't.

The NES games were the only ones they said would be receiving updates, and even then it was only when they released to the general public. Nintendo was clear from the start that they had no plans to release the GBA games to the general public, nor did they ever give any indication of plans for future upgrades to any non-NES VC game.

Besides, unlike NES, GBA is a handheld, and multiplayer linking between handhelds work very differently than consoles which simply support multiple controllers on the same system. Since multiplayer hasn't been supported for any of the GB games, it's a pretty reasonable conclusion that GBA won't be any different.

The only games we can safely expect to support multiplayer at this point are Ice Climber, Balloon Fight, and Yoshi.

They never said it would support download play multiplayer, but that's a pretty obvious conclusion at this point.