Your Favorite Nintendo 3DS & Wii U Games May Have Been Saved After All

13.04.2024 - 14:53 / screenrant.com / Matthew Wilcox / Nintendo

It has been the end of an era for the 3DS and Wii U, but the functionality of the Nintendoconsoles’ games may now be better protected than many initially thought. Considering the widespread repercussions, it is easy to see the recent shutdown of online services tied to the consoles as Nintendo destroying the childhood of many people. However, action has been taken to combat the dire effect that this will have on many beloved games, and save them from their fates.

Nintendo’s discontinuing of online services for the 3DS and Wii U has long been a sad but inevitable fact as the company moves forward with the Nintendo Switch and recently rumored Nintendo Switch 2 consoles. As the older consoles transitioned into having a more nostalgic form of popularity, it gradually made less sense for Nintendo to continue providing the digital infrastructure that surrounded them. This first led to the closure of the Nintendo eShop for the consoles last year and now to the total cessation of online services. Naturally, this has had a devastating effect on games that rely on these services for their content.

However, while Nintendo has ended official online support for the affected consoles as of April 8, 2024, the surrounding community has not given up. The SpotPass Archival Project is a fan-run initiative with the aim of preserving as much data as possible from the SpotPass service, which distributed data for various purposes, such as providing additional in-game content. This, in turn, made access to the service essential for the full enjoyment of many titles. The ending of online services means that this data is no longer officially available, a severe blow to the future of these games.

SpotPass is easy to conflate with the similarly-named StreetPass service for 3DS. However, as it allows nearby consoles to exchange data directly via their own hardware instead of over the internet, StreetPass is still entirely functional.

This is where the SpotPass Archival Project has stepped in. Set up by the passionate modding community that still exists around the 3DS and Wii U, an appeal to fellow console users to provide their SpotPass data has resulted in an immense response. At present, 3DS owners have given the project 15,778 data dumps, while a smaller contribution of 7,527 data dumps have been provided for the Wii U. As the SpotPass servers are apparently still online at this time, these numbers may well continue to grow until they are fully shut down.

Happily, there is an immense variety of games whose SpotPass data has been included in these data dumps. The list of captured data includes several and titles for the 3DS, and and for the Wii U. Various titles can also be seen to have archived data, as do The entirety of