It’s March 26th, 2023 and tomorrow, the online store of the Nintendo 3DS will be shut down.
If i had enough time, knowledge and writing skills i could write a big, thoughtful piece on the History Of The 3DS And The Ways It Was Unique In The Games Industry; but i am merely a little guy who has played a lot on his tiny handheld and enjoyed many games with it for the past 9 years, and this is not a big retrospective of the 3DS but just a few musings and memories related to my time with it.
The first games i got with my 3DS were The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and Animal Crossing: New Leaf. I also benefited from a promotional event that offered me a free digital copy of Super Mario 3D Land for having bought Zelda, and another promotional thing that got me Super Mario Bros Deluxe for free because i had 3D Land. Super Mario Bros i almost never played, because who wants to play Super Mario Bros anymore- and i still haven’t finished Zelda, but the other two games have quickly found their way into my heart as among the best of their respective franchises. Animal Crossing in particular was a strong early inspiration for me as a game maker, both in terms of visual direction, vibes and its relationship to the real time and real world, and it’s probably shaped me as much as other games i always talk about (like Katamari Damacy, but that'll be for another time maybe).
Aside from Animal Crossing, i have lots of memories with the 3DS.
StreetPass made me aware of the sheer variety of other people around me who enjoy all sorts of games, and it made me play with others and on my own in a way that i unfortunately don’t think can ever be repeated again. On the other hand, it'll be fun to nostalgically reminisce with friends in 20 years and say "remember StreetPass? Those were the good ol' times, when we were young and walking all over town to complete our small 3D puzzles... haaa".
Attack of the Friday Monsters!, the first game by Kaz Ayabe that i played and one of the best times i’ve ever had with this medium, made me realize that games could be mostly made of vibes and that vibing to a game could absolutely be enough to have a rich, complete experience.
Luigi’s Mansion 2 made me think of the ways a place can be a playful toy full of interactions. And it managed to surprise me with its mission-based structure and the twists specific missions sometimes made to its environments (i don't ever want to hear again that this game's structure was its biggest flaw ok).
Yo-kai Watch helped me understand that one town could be a richer environment than a whole world, and that just inhabiting it was kind of better than the gamier parts of the game. Its bike musical theme is also stuck in my head forever.
BoxBoy! and Steamworld Heist both made me wonder why developers often push for more complexity and more mechanics when simplifying things can be at least as powerful at times.
Electroplankton, which i discovered on my 3DS even though it was a DS title, made me ask how such a big company like Nintendo came to publish such an experimental gem, and why they don’t take that kind of risks anymore.
Rhythm Paradise Megamix and WarioWare Gold told me that Rhythm Paradise and WarioWare were great franchises full of great ideas and that they were probably dying, and that it was a shame.
And The Denpa Men, and Pocket Card Jockey, not to mention so many older titles such as Pokémon HeartGold, the first Zelda, Earthbound, Balloon Kid… All these games and many more are titles i fondly look back on, that are a small part of me now.
Am i sad that the 3DS will « die » tomorrow with the end of its eShop? No, it was expected since its beginning, all things are ephemeral and digital services even more so. Am i sad that people won’t be able to play its most interesting, digital-only titles in the future? A bit but not really, because a lot of those games are kept in some form on the net, preserved by organizations in legal ways (even if they constantly have to face obstacles from Nintendo and other companies), and can be -illegally- dowloaded and put on any modded handheld (which i recently found out is not that hard and pretty quick!), or emulated on a computer. Against big corporations that don’t make enough money off of their past and thus won’t care about the preservation of their own history, it feels morally right to me to use all means available to do their job in their stead and get access to what they abandon.
No, if there is one thing i care about that is dying with the 3DS, it’s the idea of the mainstream handheld and the category of games it allowed to exist. There was often a quaint, lovely crappiness about those games, due to their budget, their scopes and the size of their development teams, that allowed even big companies to experiment more freely than they would have for HD consoles or computers. The games were cheaper, shorter, displayed on a low-resolution screen, they toyed with whatever weird control methods were built in the console (tactile, microphone, double screen, StreetPass…), and they were often used to try things and figure out what that would eventually be added to the Bigger Games. As a result, they felt less intimidating to the wannabe game maker i was, and even now they are more my « dream games » than any AAA product on PS5 or whatever can ever be.
The Switch, with the ability it provides people to play on their big TV, has killed those kinds of weirder, smaller projects from bigger studios because they would get too expensive and thus too risky for the sorts of concepts they featured. Independant games by smaller studios and individuals have since carried that torch but the context of play isn’t the same on a console that can run huge hyper realistic worlds too and on a small, toylike handheld home to games of similar scales. And newer projects such as the Playdate have been created and kickstarted, sometimes to a certain degree of success, but i find that they are so niche they can quickly feel like tiny walled gardens, with a handful of developers creating a handful of games for only a handful of players; when they aren’t just luxurious ways of playing retro games on an expensive emulator wrapped in transluscent plastic.
So yeah, it’s March 26th, 2023 and tomorrow, the online store of the Nintendo 3DS will be shut down. That’s ultimately not a huge deal, but at the same time that is kind of a big deal still, at least for me. I probably won’t be a game developer for handheld consoles, which feels a little bit sad, however i don’t plan on stopping playing games on my modded 3DS anytime soon, and i don’t plan on stopping making games with those kinds of scope and weird, great ideas.
Good night 3DS, thank you for all the nice times :)
