Nintendo’s decision to close both the Wii U and 3DS eShops might make commercial sense for the company, but for fans and lovers of video game history it’s a disaster, as it’s feared many of the games being removed will disappear and never be seen or made available ever again.
Why game archivists are dreading this month’s 3DS/Wii U eShop shutdown
This excellent piece on Ars Technica last week goes into this whole tragedy in depth, it’s recommended reading if this is of any interest to you whatsoever.
Loads of these games are tiny little indie things that probably haven’t been purchased or heard from for years, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth preserving! And besides, some of the games disappearing are big, important releases. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, for example, prestigious winner of “My Favourite Video Game Of All Time”, will no longer be legally and commercially available once the Wii U eShop shuts down.
In an effort to address this—or at least address it in a single place on as few consoles as possible—YouTuber The Completionist decided to sit down and spend almost a year of his life (328 days in total) buying his way through both libraries.
He’s now done, and the statistics are staggering. The dude bought 866 Wii U games and 1547 3DS titles, numbers that include DSiWare, Virtual Console releases and downloadable content. That adds up to 1.2TB of data for the Wii U, and 267GB for the 3DS. Or, for the 3DS purists reading, 2,136,689 blocks.
Over 460 eShop cards were used during all that purchasing, and in total he spent a whopping $22,791. If you want to see how it all came together, the video below explains the whole process:
If you’re wondering what happens to all this stuff now, The Completionist says at the end of the video that he’s donating everything he downloaded to the Video Game History Foundation (though as an organisation that has traditionally only dealt with physical media, and with digital games presenting legal challenges, what actually happens to everything downloaded in the long run is still unclear).