We Miss the Spirit of Experimentation that Drove Nintendo’s WiiWare and 3DS eShop Stores

Nintendo isn’t struggling by any definition of the word. Sure, you can find an op-ed or two about how the Switch is underpowered in 2023 or what have you, but the sales figures suggest the general public doesn’t mind that so much, and even more importantly, the software releasing for the last-gen console is selling, too. The quality of some key, long-term series has never been higher than on the Switch, it has the kind of robust third-party support Nintendo hadn’t enjoyed for decades outside its handheld platforms, and again, even with Microsoft and Sony moving into the next generation of hardware, the Switch is doing numbers all over the world.

And yet, there’s something to lament about this generation, and we’re getting a reminder of it with next week’s closure of the 3DS eShop. For all of the Switch’s success in bringing out the best in some series (Kirby, Fire Emblem) and reviving others long left fallow with new, fantastic entries (Metroid Dread), some of Nintendo’s experimental spirit of the past is gone. That’s not to say they aren’t trying anything new or ambitious—this is the console that kicked off with Breath of the Wild, after all—but that the focus is entirely on the Big Stuff these days, and the experimental spirit that powered their digital forays on the Wii and DSi are missing from the modern catalog.

When Nintendo shut down purchases on the Wii shop in early 2019, they were cutting off access to a host of classic titles living on the Virtual Console, but they also closed everyone off from the many WiiWare games hosted on the service. These days, digital releases are just that, with no fancy names, but the Wii’s digital storefront arrived at a time when this was a new concept: the Playstation 3 had Minis, the Xbox 360 had Xbox Arcade, and the Wii had WiiWare. Like with the Minis and Arcade, there was a feeling out process happening, and the volume of digital-only games wasn’t what it is today, but even in this early time there were some real gems. 

Often, WiiWare featured smaller games with an intriguing concept, ones that either would have died at retail because of the price range a physical game requires, or never been approved for a shot at a store shelf in the first place. On the Wii, however, they were priced between $5 and $15, and part of the idea was to create an avenue for smaller developers to get a chance to shine—Gaijin Games (now Choice Provisions) got their start there with the Bit.Trip games, but it also ended up as a path for established studios to get a retro revival going. Konami put out retro-styled Gradius, Castlevania, and Contra games, and Hudson Soft a Bomberman, Adventure Island, and Alien Crush sequel, while Capcom revived the NES-era Mega Man with Mega Man 9. 

The service is how Nintendo first brought the wonderful Art Style games to North America: the first round of this kind of game (known then as bit Generations) released on the Game Boy Advance, but in Japan only. Those concepts were revisited and new ones drawn up for a series of digital releases on the Wii. Many of them were puzzle games, but thoughtful and different ones: Cubello had you using the IR pointer of the Wii Remote to aim blocks that you’d fire at a puzzle made of more blocks; it wasn’t as easy as matching colors, as the core of cubes would spin every time it was struck. Rotohex had you rotating the play area, attempting to create hexagons out of triangles that were falling onto the screen. Rotozoa had you playing as a microscopic organism with tentacles, attempting to traverse your environment and grow by touching other organisms of the same color, again through rotation. 

The jewel of the bunch was Orbient, though: you’re controlling a small star, in the hopes of it becoming a much larger star. How large depends on the level in question. You move via a combination of gravity and anti-gravity, deployed with the A and B buttons, You’ll propel yourself through space, finding yourself caught up in the gravitational pull of larger objects, hoping to avoid collisions, absorbing smaller celestial objects until you’re large enough to “eat” more and more of what’s around you. It’s a beautiful little game, and the kind of experiment you just don’t see Nintendo attempt anymore.

The Art Style games weren’t the only thing Nintendo put on WiiWare, though: it was their shop and concept at a time before digital shops were a given success story, so they supported the hell out of it. MaBoShi’s Arcade was three small games in one, and while it was a single-player experience in the sense you could play only one of those three at a time, it could also be played by two others alongside you, and what happened in one of those games would impact the others. It was weird, ambitious and with depth despite the simplicity, and also kind of impossible to explain to someone looking for a game at Target or whatever. In other words, it was a perfect title for WiiWare. 

Bonsai Barber was a game developed by Martin Hollis of GoldenEye 007 fame where you gave haircuts to plants. Mesmerizing! Excitebike: World Rally is the definitive version of the classic Excitebike formula, which is the kind of thing you could charge $10 for digitally but probably not release in stores for holiday 2009. Fluidity is a physics puzzle platformer where you control a small amount of water that you’ll slosh around the screen. You, Me, & the Cubes was a collaboration between Nintendo and Kenji Eno’s studio, FYTO—Eno was a Japanese musician and game designer whose previous studio, Warp, developed the games Enemy Zero and D. Within, the focus is on balance, which you’ll achieve by thinking about physics: you have to fling tiny people onto cubes, and hope that it doesn’t upset the balance in a way that causes them all to collapse. Again: not the kind of little game you could do at retail, but one you’d remember playing a decade-and-a-half later.

The WiiWare concept moved over to Nintendo’s handheld space with the release of the DSi and DSiWare—that shop featured its own slate of Art Style titles and plenty more Nintendo offerings, too. 11 Nintendo-published DSiWare titles were just featured in my list of 3DS eShop games you need to get before the shop closes, and there were ones I left off that list that are also a good time, like the infuriatingly fun puzzler Link ‘n’ Launch. Or Q-Games’ Trajectile, which looks like a cross between Bust-a-Move and Breakout featuring missiles that bounce off of walls. Or Bird & Beans, which was just a $2 remake of the hidden games in WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames!, and as fun as it is simple. Or Aura-Aura Climber, where you played as a fallen star trying to get back into space via slingshotting yourself all over the place. Nintendo even bothered to publish a shoot-em-up, Metal Torrent, on DSiWare, which is an extremely rare thing for them to do! 

This kind of experimentation with smaller releases continued onto the 3DS: the whole “Ware” concept was dropped, as every console developer relaxed knowing that digital distribution had been fully embraced and no longer needed cutesy trademarked names attached, but otherwise, Nintendo kept doing what they had been doing on their previous handheld. Fluidity: Spin Cycle is a sequel to the original WiiWare offering, and just as enjoyable. HAL Laboratory came up with the very cute and lovingly animated puzzle platformer BoxBoy! on the 3DS, and then two sequels followed. They also used the digital capabilities of the 3DS to expand Kirby’s catalog in a way that it hadn’t been since the early days of the franchise: multiple sub-games from Kirby releases in that generation were blown up into full-on digital games, many of them easily worth the asking price. 

Intelligent Systems developed their own new puzzler, the block-moving Pushmo, and followed that with Crashmo and Stretchmo. Game Freak developed HarmoKnight, a rhythm runner platformer with a strict need for you to have perfect timing, and Pocket Card Jockey, which has you playing as a jockey who is very bad at racing horses but very good at solitaire, and after he dies, has his skill in the latter tied to his skill in the former. Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword has a look that belies its From-style reliance on timing and pattern recognition in order to survive the many encounters you’ll have within. The trio of Dillon’s Rolling Western games are tower defense westerns where you attack creatures attempting to eat all the livestock they can find with an armadillo in a cowboy hat. 

And then there’s the king of what you can do digitally and could never get away with on a retail shelf: Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball, a game where you buy baseball skills competition videogame cartridges from a depressed dog afraid of divorce by haggling with him over the price, is kind of a wild standard of experimentation to hold anyone to, but it’s the kind of place you don’t end up in unless you’ve been doing a lot of experimenting in the first place. That kind of spirit just isn’t there on the Switch. Maybe there can never be another Rusty’s, but the path that brought Nintendo that place was full of plenty of other sights to see, and it hasn’t been taken in some time.

And now, with WiiWare already shuttered for years, and DSiWare about to vanish from everywhere besides the system memory of anyone who has purchased them already, that path not taken is just going to be forgotten about as we all move on to the next thing. Maybe Nintendo, which on the development side likes to keep things much smaller than their revenues suggest they could, is too focused on making the Switch the kind of success that the consoles that housed WiiWare and DSiWare were not, and is doing so with a focus on much larger, name releases. The Wii sold plenty of consoles, but software was another story, and while the 3DS did well on both hardware and software sales, it was no DS, either. It might make sense from a business point of view to go back to the large-scale model here—to have HAL and Intelligent Systems focused more on their larger, successful series—and it probably doesn’t help that a studio like skip, which worked so closely with Nintendo for over a decade on the weird and the small, is all but closed now. 

Valid excuses or not, I’m still mourning the loss of a specific version of Nintendo alongside the loss of the shops that helped facilitate that iteration of the company. Mario, Splatoon, Animal Crossing, Pokémon: all the big sellers are great, and Nintendo has even spent a lot of time over the Switch’s lifespan successfully focusing on the series that, from a sales point of view, are more B-tier for them. I have no complaints about any of that, or at least, none worth bringing up here. Still, I can’t help but feel a twinge of sadness about the loss of the developmental spirit that brought us Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball, the Art Style games, the close partnerships with Q-Games and skip, and the freedom afforded to the first-party studios like Brownie Brown and HAL and Intelligent Systems to come up with something different, something bold, something experimental that the existence of the digital shops could support in a way brick-and-mortar retail could not. 

Maybe, when the 3DS eShop closes down, and all the games mentioned here and elsewhere are no longer available, Nintendo will start porting them over to the Switch. And maybe interest in those titles in their new home will reignite whatever fire has gone out over there and kept Nintendo from pushing small-scale titles like they did a decade and more ago. Hey, it’s a more realistic thought than Nintendo reversing course on closing off yet another era of their history. And it’s a more comforting one than considering that, for whatever reason, the version of Nintendo that created far more than just megahits with established stars is being left behind with that history.

The Nintendo 3DS eShop closes permanently on Monday, March 27, 2023. So does the Wii U eShop.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.