DGamer

» see dgamer.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i missed dgamer because i missed the nintendo ds. handhelds were never my stack. i was on a desktop with a wired ethernet line into a ttnet adsl modem and the only games i was playing in 2008 were either steam titles or the older ultima online private servers that were still running. the ds was something nieces had on the back seat during car trips.

dgamer launched on 15 may 2008, the same day as the chronicles of narnia: prince caspian ds title. it was built by fall line studios with disney interactive and ran on top of the nintendo wi-fi connection. the pitch was that disney-licensed ds games could expose a shared friend list and a shared avatar system that the player carried across the catalog. about thirty disney-published ds titles eventually wired into it, covering club penguin properties, toy story 3, high school musical, and the tinker bell tie-ins. a parallel web channel on disney.com let the player manage their dgamer profile from a browser.

nintendo announced in early 2013 that it would retire the wi-fi connection service that march. dgamer's online side went down with it on 15 march 2013. the local-wireless multiplayer in the supported titles kept working for anyone who still had two ds units in the same room. the network side never came back in any form.

~ the dossier ~

~ the wi-fi spine ~

nintendo wi-fi connection was the layer dgamer sat on. it was a free service nintendo had run since 2005 to handle online multiplayer for ds and wii titles. it ran on gamespy infrastructure for most of its life. when gamespy's parent company glu mobile announced it would shut down the underlying service in 2014, nintendo had already pre-retired the consumer-facing wi-fi connection to a march 2013 cutoff. dgamer's death was a direct downstream consequence: when the spine went away, every network feature that rode on it died on the same day.

~ the day it died ~

15 march 2013 took out a lot more than dgamer. mario kart ds online lobbies. animal crossing wild world net access. metroid prime hunters online. dozens of third party ds and wii titles all lost their online features in one cutoff. dgamer was a small entry in a long list of services that went dark that day. the difference is that the first-party nintendo titles still had their single-player and local multiplayer modes intact. dgamer was specifically a wrapper around the online piece, so when the online piece went away, there was nothing left.

~ what it left ~

not much, in product terms. disney rolled its kids-social efforts back into the club penguin and disney infinity directions after dgamer's death, and neither of those carried the ds wrapper concept forward. the closer spiritual successor to what dgamer was trying to do is nintendo's own miiverse on the wii u and 3ds, which arrived a few months before dgamer's death and itself died in 2017. the ds-era handheld social experiment ended without leaving a product line behind it.

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