Nintendo Is Destroying Your Childhood On April 8

Nintendo will be discontinuing online services for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U consoles at 4pm PDT on April 8, 2024. While it had previously closed the eShop for these devices, which stopped players from further downloading any DLC for their games, this new server shutdown will impact many actual games, as it will remove online play, internet rankings, and anything that involves data distribution.

Nintendo made this announcement back in January, and since then, Redditor 2mock2turtle has been on a mission to find out exactly what 3DS games will be impacted and how. 2mock2turtle took to the r/Nintendo subreddit with a comprehensive list featuring hundreds of titles. They also stated that this is their first pass as they encouraged other 3DS aficionados to help fact-check it and add any that have been missed, so its possible many more may be added as time goes on.

Server shutdowns such as this and the closure of the eShop are a huge problem for game preservation. When the eShop closed on the Wii and Nintendo DS consoles, many complained that Nintendo weren't adding these titles to its digital store on the Switch instead, meaning that those who didn't want to purchase second-hand physical copies — which increased significantly in price for some titles afterward — would be left without a legal means of playing the game, especially with Nintendo clamping down on emulators and other means of keeping older titles alive.

2mock2turtle's list is disheartening, as it shows many major features being removed from across 15 years' worth of titles. Most of the titles shown are entirely losing multiplayer modes, while the popular is having a huge chunk of its functionality taken away, such as communication with other players and towns; downloadable items, letters, and Happy Home Showcase models, making it a shell of the title it once was. is also losing story content as a result of losing online features.

With so many people having grown up with these titles, and likely amassing