Believe it or not, the Nintendo 3DS is now 10 years old. The successor to Nintendo's hit DS handheld system sold fairly well, despite a rocky start thanks to a dicey initial price-point and lack of enticing launch titles. Once the 3DS found its footing, its library of games grew greatly, with a massive amount of hit 1st and 3rd party titles developed for the system, including games like Super Mario 3D World, Kid Icarus Uprising, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, and Resident Evil: Revelations.
While many Nintendo DS games had online capabilities, the range of games with online features only grew with the release of the 3DS, which even supported some of Nintendo's biggest series, like Super Smash Bros. However, despite living alongside the Switch for a little while, the Nintendo 3DS is now officially phased out of Nintendo's future plans, but with 10 years since its launch, a fan experiment has set out to find if there are still people playing 3DS games online in 2021.
Many services have begun to shut down on older Nintendo consoles, so, Nintendo Life's Jon Cartwright has recently set out to dispel the notion that online games on older Nintendo consoles have no active player bases in current day. Now, Cartwright has conducted an experiment to see whether people around the world are still enjoying 3DS games online this year. Cartwright experimented with a variety of 3DS games, trying to find online players at varying times of the day to account for timezone differences.
In the experiment, Cartwright included 3DS games from a variety of genres from fighting games to shooters, and found generally surprising results. For Super Street Fighter 4 3D Edition, a 3DS launch title, Cartwright was able to find online matches almost immediately, finding an opponent 93% of the time. In Super Smash Bros. for 3DS, Cartwright found 1v1 For Glory matches almost instantly with every test, though other modes didn't yield many opponents. Cartwright was also able to play with some people in games like Kid Icarus: Uprising, Metroid Prime Blast Ball, and Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D, though not enough to fill an entire lobby.
Unfortunately, Cartwright found no opponents when searching online in Tekken 3D: Prime Edition, and couldn't find enough players to start a game of the ever-strange The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes. As for Mario Kart 7, the best-selling Nintendo 3DS game of all time, Cartwright was able to find players every time without fail, even finding full 8-player lobbies in both races and the Battle mode multiple times.
Although various services have begun to shut down on the 3DS and now Nintendo is cutting down the system's digital library, this experiment has shown that online play on the 3DS is still alive and well for the most part. So for now, it seems that players feeling nostalgic for their Nintendo 3DS can hop into a game of Super Street Fighter 4 3D Edition or Mario Kart 7 with ease.