Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection

» see nintendo.com/wifi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection launched on November 14, 2005, alongside Mario Kart DS in North America. It was Nintendo's first proper consumer online service after the failed Famicom Network in Japan and the equally niche N64 modem before it. The pitch was that you would type your friend's twelve-digit code into your DS, find them in a lobby and race them in Mario Kart from anywhere with a wireless hotspot. The service was free. Nintendo was paying GameSpy to host the matchmaking under the hood.

By 2008 the service ran most Nintendo online multiplayer worth caring about. Mario Kart DS, Animal Crossing Wild World, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, Super Smash Bros Brawl, Tetris DS, Mario Strikers Charged on the Wii. The Wii Shop Channel piggybacked on the same backend for game downloads. The launch was strong: Nintendo claimed about 60 thousand Mario Kart DS players online in the first weekend, and by mid-2006 the service had cleared a couple million accounts.

I missed Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection because I missed handheld nintendo as a whole. By 2005 I was 21, on counter-strike at the internet cafe and on ultima online private servers at home, with a DS nowhere on the shopping list. Handheld nintendo in Turkey was a kid product more than a young-adult one. The friend-code system was the kind of thing only somebody who already had a school-friend-group on DSes would tolerate. My friend group was on MSN.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

The genius of the launch was that it worked at all. Nintendo had been a stubborn outlier on online play through the N64 and the GameCube. Sony and Microsoft had online services on PS2 and Xbox by 2002. Nintendo waited three more years and then delivered a working DS-and-Wii service to hundreds of millions of devices in one go. The infrastructure under it was rented from GameSpy, which was the right call: GameSpy already powered online play for dozens of console games.

The Wii pushed the same service into the living room. Mario Kart Wii ended up the highest-selling racing game ever for its generation, with much of its replay value tied directly to Wi-Fi Connection multiplayer. Super Smash Bros Brawl with online play was the first realistic mainstream nintendo online multiplayer in the home. The platform peaked somewhere around 2008 to 2010.

~ the unraveling ~

The friend-code system aged badly. Adding someone required typing twelve digits per direction, with no profile system to find people by name. Voice chat was missing on almost every title. The matchmaking pools were small even at peak, and once the service had been on the market a few years, finding a Mario Kart DS race at 2 AM meant either you got lucky or you sat in the lobby alone.

The deeper problem was the backend. Nintendo Network shipped on the 3DS in 2011 and on the Wii U in 2012 to replace the older service, but it never fully cut over. The DS and Wii kept relying on GameSpy. When Glu Mobile acquired GameSpy in 2012 and started winding down legacy services, the clock started running on Wi-Fi Connection.

~ what really happened ~

Nintendo announced the shutdown on February 26, 2014. Wi-Fi Connection would go dark on May 20. Players had three months to play one last online Mario Kart DS race or send one last Animal Crossing letter before the matchmaking went away. The shutdown was a partial one for the affected games: single-player kept working, but anything that touched the matchmaking servers went dark forever. Wii Shop Channel and other services that did not run on GameSpy stayed up for another five years.

~ the long tail ~

Fan-run replacements rebuilt parts of the service. Wiimmfi is the most-used one for Wii titles, with a custom DNS that reroutes Mario Kart Wii and Smash Bros Brawl traffic to a community server. AltWFC and Pretendo do similar work for the DS and 3DS layers. The friend-code system was preserved in the rebuilds because it was load-bearing for too many games to remove. The community kept Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection alive long after Nintendo itself had handed it back to GameSpy's ghost.

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