PictoChat

~ the eulogy ~

PictoChat had one requirement no update could fix: a second Nintendo DS within ten meters. It came preloaded on the console from November 2004 with no account and no server behind it, which is why it is one of very few dead services with no shutdown announcement anywhere. In 2004 I was twenty years old, playing Counter-Strike in Ankara internet cafes on somebody else's machines, and handheld Nintendo hardware was thin on the ground here. The one thing PictoChat needed was local density of DS owners, and that is exactly what Turkey did not have.

Up to sixteen people could join one of four rooms, labeled A through D, for sixty-four users at once across all of them. You wrote on the touch screen with the stylus or tapped letters out on an on-screen keyboard, and a drawing could be dragged straight into the message window and sent. The glyph set covered enough Latin and kana to write every language the console itself supported.

Because sent messages stayed on screen, people worked out something Nintendo had not advertised. Draw a frame, send it, copy it, nudge one line, send it again, and then hold L and R to run the whole room back as an animation. Nintendo eventually documented the trick in the instruction booklet, and in 2009 turned it into a real product, Flipnote Studio for the DSi. The DSi build of PictoChat also added a rainbow pen and a special message when somebody joined a room on their birthday.

It won an Excellence Prize for Entertainment at the 2004 Japan Media Arts Festival, which is a strange honor for a bundled utility with a bare-bones interface. Dating its death takes a ruling rather than a source, because there was never a server to turn off. The Nintendo 3DS arrived in February 2011 with no PictoChat on it, and that is the date this grave uses.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ten meter rule ~

PictoChat was a LAN messenger in the strictest sense. System to system, wireless, no router in between and no internet account required. That isolation is why it never touched Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, and why the 2014 closure of that service, which killed online play for the whole DS library, left PictoChat completely untouched.

It also means the software is still sitting there. Two working DS consoles in the same room will still find each other in 2026. What died was Nintendo shipping it on new hardware, not the code.

~ banned from classrooms ~

Previewing the DS at E3 2004, Ricardo Torres of GameSpot called PictoChat "one of the most interesting pieces of software on display" for the system while describing its interface as "bare bones". Craig Harris at IGN put it more flatly: "more for fun than functionality", a thing "made for people in a classroom, or a plane".

Hyper magazine got closest to what actually happened. In February 2005 it called PictoChat "the highlight of the launch package" and "riotously good fun", and predicted the console would be banned from classrooms within months of release. It was. A silent drawing-based chat with a ten meter range is a perfect school-desk machine, and teachers in a dozen countries worked that out faster than the games press did.

~ what replaced it ~

Swapnote came to the 3DS eShop in December 2011 as the official replacement, with a critical omission: it was not instant messaging. You wrote a note and the system carried it later. In November 2013 Nintendo stripped out the SpotPass delivery after users started sending offensive material to strangers, including minors, which left Swapnote as a local-only toy. Swapdoodle followed in 2016 with tighter rules and never found an audience.

Meanwhile PictoChat itself survived as scenery. A stage based on it appears in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a second version turns up in Smash for 3DS, and an HD remake of that stage is in Ultimate. The messenger was retired. The wallpaper got a remaster.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »