It made me think about Nintendo's late president Satoru Iwata, who loved to talk about ways to make hardware a genuine pleasure to use, beyond the questions of shape, button size and so on. Some of those were inherited from the DS, and here too was Nintendo thinking about touch and how to use it in play. This thing, on the other hand, has a metallic gleam, and is full of mischievous details. My Switch Lite is quiet and sterile by comparison. There is something inviting about the 3DS, from the small jingle it plays when it turn it on to the little shopping bag that bows to you at the eshop, to unwrapping your downloads like presents- Just navigating through the menu is full of small sights and sounds, and the 3D effect on the upper screen seems to exist simply because it's neat and kind of magical. I know the quotes about Nintendo's philosophy being that of a toy maker first, game company second are so worn they've got calluses, but I think I never really understood what that meant when not applied to an experimental product like Nintendo Labo or playing tennis with Wiimotes. I had to look that up, because just like on the day of its release, the 3DS passed me by entirely, released during a time when my relationship with videogames was as much like my relationship with money and consumer products on the whole - occasionally complicated, mostly non-existent.įast forward 10 years later, where people talk to me about videogames every day, and not having a 3DS suddenly felt like a genuine oversight, not because of FOMO, but because people who know my taste would not stop saying things like 'You will love Ghost Trick' or 'You should really play Fire Emblem Awakening', and while I shrugged them off, wary of spending even more of my money on games, these recommendations lingered, if only for how often they were repeated.Įventually, a friend lent me their 3DS, and that broke the dam - not because of the games so much as this small, cute thing - a genuine handheld that even occasionally fits into a woman's trouser pocket, and it's whimsical by design. While I sat in a pub with a gruesomely sticky carpet and drank Strongbow with my friends, people in Japan shuffled, rather than ran, to buy Nintendo's latest offering, which would reach the West about a month later. The 3DS apparently released on my birthday in 2011.

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