Flipnote Gallery: World

~ the goodbye ~

Flipnote Gallery: World was cut at the border. Nintendo shipped Flipnote Studio 3D on the Japanese eShop on 24 July 2013 with two online services attached, and when the software finally reached North America in February 2015 and Europe in March 2016, the gallery was not in the box. Western players got a drawing tool and local wireless transfer between two handhelds sitting in the same room. Japanese players got the network.

The part that reached the West was the smaller half of the product. Inside Japan you drew a flipnote on the bottom screen, frame by frame with a stylus, and uploaded it to a gallery that anybody else with the software could browse. That was the same loop Flipnote Hatena had run on the DSi, except Hatena was free and run by a Kyoto web company, while this one was Nintendo's own and you paid for it.

Nintendo delayed the Western release for years and said the reason out loud: usage of the Japanese online services had been unexpectedly high. By the time the software did come out in English the company had decided the gallery was not coming with it, which left a strange object on the eShop, an animation tool whose entire social half had been removed before anyone outside Japan ever saw it work.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the paid part ~

Access ran on tickets. A pass cost 100 yen and lasted 30 days, and your first one arrived free the moment you connected. On top of that there was a window every afternoon when the gallery opened to everybody at no charge, with a currency called coins handling the smaller transactions inside the software. For a Nintendo product aimed largely at children this was an unusual shape, closer to an arcade than to an app.

The pricing is also what made the shutdown legible. When Nintendo stopped selling tickets on 2 October 2017 it did not simply let the service coast for six months. The same notice promised to extend the free window and increase the daily coin allowance, so the last half-year of Flipnote Gallery: World was cheaper and more generous than any period before it.

~ what the servers were holding ~

The gallery had a second room in it called the DSi Gallery, and that room is why the closure mattered beyond its own user count. It carried almost every flipnote ever uploaded to Flipnote Hatena, excluding only the work of creators who had asked to be left out. Hatena's service had already ended; Nintendo's paid 3DS gallery was the surviving copy, and for four years it was the only place that archive was served from.

What saved it was carelessness rather than planning. The whole thing ran out of four Amazon S3 buckets that were left open to anyone who knew the names, which is how the Kaeru Team and the Flipnote Collective later reverse engineered the KWZ animation format and pulled the files down. A paid Nintendo service turned out to be a public directory with a paywall drawn on top of it.

~ the day it died ~

Monday 2 April 2018 at 10:00 Tokyo time. The notice is three paragraphs of corporate Japanese that thank you for your patronage and apologize to customers who had been using the service. Drawing and local exchange kept working, because neither needs a server. Everything that made the thing a place stopped.

I was thirty-four when this happened, which is roughly twenty-five years older than the audience, and the 3DS was never a default object in Turkey the way a PC was. The distance here is not really the geography though. It is that a children's drawing community can run for five years, hold the only live copy of a dead predecessor's entire output, and end on a Monday morning with a support-page notice and no press coverage in any language but one.

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