Nintendo 3DS Turns 5 Today

Published: January 26, 2016 9:00 AM /

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3DS-Models-Open

Five years ago today the first of the Nintendo 3DS consoles launched in Japan. It would be another month before the launch in North America, Europe, and Australia but the world was excited. Since its release, there has been a new iteration of the 3DS every year, sometimes to just change the look or size and more recently an update to the hardware in general.

Nintendo 3DS attached to girls
People thought it might have been difficult to play games with a girl attached to it but once you remove the girl you can really focus on playing.

It was at E3 way back in 2010 that the Nintendo 3DS was revealed to the public. That was the first time that the world heard that the Nintendo 3DS would be able to give you a stereoscopic 3D without any glasses. It was something that Nintendo knew wouldn't be possible to show people around the world so they brought out 3DSes chained to girls to walk around and give everyone in the room a chance to test it out. With the announcement of the handheld console itself launch window titles like Kid Icarus: Uprising, Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater 3D, and more were announced or at the very least teased. After some final tweaks to the device's design, it was almost half a year later that the release date of February 26th, 2011 was selected for the Japanese launch of the Nintendo 3DS.

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With the 3DS we're able to experience Pokemon Battles like never before.

Since the 10 launch titles that released with the console in Japan, there are now 701 Nintendo 3DS titles out and more release every week. Games from popular franchises like Mario, Pokemon, Animal Crossing, and The Legend of Zelda have flourished on this hardware and the ability to view the games in 3D has changed the way we've been able to play games. I don't know any kid when I was growing up that didn't want to see the Pokemon from my team move around and fight like we have been able to with games like Pokemon X & Y and more recently the remake of Gen 3's Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire.

Whenever new innovative technology comes around like the 3D of the 3DS, or more recently with multiple VR display,s these technologies would never gain public support until they were made affordable. The Nintendo 3DS not only made the idea of playing video games in 3D something that was affordable but with the ability to view the 3D without the need of special glasses made its adoption as the successor to the Nintendo DS an easy one. I think it would be difficult to meet anyone who enjoys video games that hasn't tried out the 3DS for this feature at some point.

From here the 3DS has gotten larger and slightly more powerful with the few games that are New 3DS only. Who knows what Nintendo's next step will be, whether more support for the New 3DS or whether there is something completely new up their sleeves to go with the Nintendo NX.

What do you think of the 5 years of Nintendo 3DS? What are some of your favorite games for the 3DS? What do you always wish you could be able to do on your 3DS?

Have a tip, or want to point out something we missed? Leave a Comment or e-mail us at tips@techraptor.net


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| Senior Content Manager

Andrew has written Video Game and Entertainment news, reviews, and guides for 10+ years. As Senior Content Manager, he assists in creating and editing… More about Andrew