On September 17, Nintendo officially announced the 3DS handheld had been discontinued after being available on store shelves for the past nine years. Considering the popularity of the Switch, the 3DS being discontinued was inevitable, but the console still had a strong run, producing plenty of great exclusive games and becoming another successful handheld for Nintendo.
However, the 3DS wasn’t always a hit. There once was a time when the 3DS seriously struggled to find an audience, forcing Nintendo to reevaluate its strategy for its unique handheld. Over time, there were many major decisions Nintendo made to turn the 3DS around, and ultimately, it was successful in this endeavor.
Here is a detailed history of the Nintendo 3DS handheld.
Ever since it launched the original Game Boy in the 1980s, Nintendo has had huge success in the handheld gaming market. The Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance were also big hits, and so it came as a big surprise when Nintendo decided to move away from the Game Boy brand to launch the Nintendo DS. An innovative new take on a handheld gaming system, the Nintendo DS used a dual-screen design, touchscreen input, and a microphone help create completely new kinds of gaming experiences.
The Nintendo DS was a massive sales success for Nintendo, and so anticipation was high for the follow-up. While Nintendo could have simply made a more powerful version of the DS, it instead decided to take things further, creating a handheld with glasses-free 3D capabilities.
Nintendo had experimented with 3D technology for decades prior to the 3DS, with mixed results. Perhaps the most notable attempt was the Virtual Boy, a tabletop gaming system that was one of the earliest attempts at 3D gaming. Unfortunately for Nintendo, the Virtual Boy was a massive flop, and support for the system died out quickly. But despite this failure, Nintendo continued to conduct research on 3D technology for use in video games.
Nintendo officially announced the Nintendo 3DS in March of 2010, showing off a handheld console that was visually similar to the DS line of handheld systems, but with some massive improvements, like glasses-free 3D, a circle pad, motion controls, backward compatibility with DS games, and more. Nintendo then gave the 3DS a proper unveiling during E3 2010, at which point it showed off a slew of games that would be coming to its new system.
In February and March of 2011, Nintendo launched the 3DS in major markets, including Japan, Europe, and North America, with North Americans getting the handheld on March 27, 2011. Players could choose between Aqua Blue and Cosmo Black color variations for their 3DS, and had a relatively strong list of launch games to choose from. Despite this, though, the 3DS struggled out of the gate, and ultimately failed to generate as much as interest as its DS predecessor.
With the Nintendo 3DS struggling in sales, Nintendo made the tough decision of slashing its price dramatically. Mere months after launch, Nintendo lowered the 3DS price from $249.99 to $169.99. As one might expect, this upset early adopters of the 3DS, and so Nintendo attempted to make things up to them by making them part of the Nintendo 3DS Ambassador Program, in turn giving them access to some free classic games.
The free classic games Nintendo gave 3DS owners were comprised of some of the company’s most notable NES and Game Boy Advance games, like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap.
While video games were the primary focus of the Nintendo 3DS, the system had a number of other features to occupy fans’ time, like the Activity Log that kept track of everything they did on the handheld, as well as various video services. Video streaming services like Netflix were supported on the 3DS, but the handheld also had its own original series, which were oftentimes viewable in 3D. One of the most memorable of these was Dinosaur Office, which was a clay-mation comedy series created exclusively for the 3DS by CollegeHumor. These video services came at a time when the 3DS was experiencing what was more or less a content drought, and so they helped ensure players still got some use out of the system while they waited for new games.
The Nintendo 3DS also had StreetPass functionality, Miiverse, an internet browser, and much more that fans could interact with to occupy their time.
If there’s one thing fans can count on when it comes to Nintendo consoles, it’s that there will be plenty of revisions. And the 3DS is no exception to that rule, with Nintendo releasing a number of 3DS revisions over the course of the handheld’s lifespan. This included the Nintendo 3DS XL, which was essentially a larger version of the standard 3DS, but with some additional improvements. It also released the Nintendo 2DS, which got rid of the 3D capability entirely, but was sold at a much cheaper rate. And finally, Nintendo also released the New Nintendo 3DS, which was a souped-up version of the 3DS that could play a handful of exclusive games that were too graphically intensive for the standard 3DS hardware.
The 3DS had a slow start, but thanks to price cuts, popular revisions, and a steady stream of high-quality exclusive games, it eventually defied the odds and became yet another major success for Nintendo. The 3DS sold a whopping 75.87 million units by the end of its lifespan, making it one of the best-selling video game consoles ever made.
Even so, everything has to come to an end, and in 2017, Nintendo released its home console/handheld hybrid, the Nintendo Switch. Effectively a successor to both the 3DS and Wii U simultaneously, Nintendo quickly turned its attention to games for the Switch instead of the 3DS. But while the 3DS is no longer being supported and has since been discontinued, there are still plenty of great 3DS games that can only be played on the system.
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