Nintendo Zone

~ the goodbye ~

Nintendo Zone required you to physically be somewhere, and the somewhere was never anywhere near me. It was a network of wifi hotspots installed in shops and fast food restaurants, first in North America and Japan in late 2008, with Europe added almost four years later. The map it ran on was drawn where Nintendo sold hardware through its own channels, and that map never reached me.

The idea was that the handheld did the work. You walked into a participating store with a DS in your bag, it found the hotspot on its own, and content arrived. Demos, trailers, things tied to whatever was being promoted that month. There was no password to type and no network to choose, which in 2008 was a genuinely strange experience to have with a portable device.

It started as an extension of the DS Download Station, the demo kiosk that sat in game shops, and the change was moving that kiosk out of the games aisle and into places people already went. McDonald's was the anchor partner in more than one country. In North America you could also find it at Best Buy and at Home Depot, which is a sentence that only makes sense if you remember that hotspots were still a thing worth advertising.

I was in my twenties and then my thirties across its whole run, in a country it never covered, and there is nothing personal here to report. What I can say is that this was a service whose entire value came from where your body was, at the exact moment the industry was moving to the position that where you are should not matter. It is one of the last mainstream products built the other way round.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

North America went first, on 14 November 2008, and Japan followed on 27 November. Europe waited until 25 April 2012, by which time the 3DS had replaced the DS and the service had a much better reason to exist. By that year there were roughly twenty five thousand European locations carrying it.

On the 3DS side it was wired into SpotPass, the system that let the console fetch things quietly while it was closed. A small application called the Nintendo Zone Viewer noticed hotspots and handled the connection. You did not launch anything. The handheld lit up in your pocket and you found out later what it had picked up.

~ the streetpass years ~

In August 2013 Nintendo added the feature that made the network genuinely worth walking to. Zone locations became StreetPass Relay Points: your console left its tag behind, and later visitors picked up as many as six tags from people who had been there earlier.

That solved a real problem. StreetPass only worked in crowds, and it worked brilliantly in Tokyo and badly almost everywhere else. Relay Points converted a density problem into a scheduling problem, so a town with one participating restaurant could still deliver strangers to your console, just with a delay. It is a small piece of engineering and one of the more inventive answers anyone has given to the fact that most people do not live in Tokyo.

~ what got buried with it ~

North America lost the service on 28 August 2016. Japan and Europe held on until 28 March 2018, and Nintendo gave no reason beyond thanking people for using it. There was not much of a reason to give. The 3DS was seven years old, the Switch had arrived, and the behavior the whole system depended on, an adult carrying a dedicated games machine through their normal day, had quietly stopped being a thing most people did.

What went with it was a specific idea about connectivity that nobody has really tried since. Nintendo Zone assumed the network should be a place, and that arriving somewhere ought to give you something you could not get at home. Everything built after it assumes the opposite, that the network is everywhere and location is just a field in a request. The version where you had to actually go there was worse in every measurable way and it is the only one anybody feels nostalgic about.

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