Between everything else, Super Smash Bros. On the New York subway, Poochy & Yoshi’s Woolly World. Six years later, it still makes me jealous. I recovered from the flare-up fast enough to grab a friend’s Polaroid and snap a picture of the five of them, sprawled out and intoxicated on a sleeper couch, grinding away at various games on their handhelds. But I began to notice that whenever they caught a second’s break, they’d begin unzipping their fabric cases. Frustrated, at one point, I told them to shut up and get a grip.
For two days, my friends took every free moment to huddle together and gossip about their virtual friends in the 3DS life-simulation game Tomodachi Life. I wasn’t sure I could handle another alienating, oppressive year in New York and needed some fresh air.ĭespite my best efforts, the beach was alienating too. We’d all had trouble acclimating to post-college life and decidedly did not have our shit together. But FOMO kicked in on a trip with some childhood friends to the beach in Delaware, exactly one year after college. And desperately cobbling together freelance jobs in New York, I didn’t have the expendable cash. I was satisfied with my red, two-dimensional, single-screen Nintendo DS-by 2014, scratched-up and covered in kawaii bubble stickers I’d collected over the years. And soon, the price would drop from $250 to a fairer $170. The 3DS, released just one year before the Wii U, was poised to absorb the hype that would normally attend a better Nintendo console release.
Its one major innovation was its gargantuan touchscreen controller, too clunky to appreciate. In retrospect, the 3DS was very “right place, right time.” While 2006’s Nintendo Wii had been a world-shaking success with its innovations in motion capture and psychedelic sports games, Nintendo’s next console, 2012’s Wii U, was its least successful. Then, I noticed them: three Nintendo 3DSes, all at one table, and all running the Smash 4 demo. I looked up briefly between sips of coffee. I was absorbed, not noticing the people around me, and hoping that, in a space better suited to ostentatious reading and Tinder dates, nobody would notice me. On the back patio, I sipped too-strong cold brew and practiced Zelda’s aerial combos.
I packed my pearl-pink 3DS into a backpack and walked over to the nearest coffee shop. I loved the demo, but sitting alone in bed, I quickly became bored of pummeling Smash 4’s CPUs. As Smash 4’s launch approached, I prayed for a good online versus mode. Unconscionable snack foods, hours of screaming in basements packed with friends and friends-of-friends left back in prior homes. I’d celebrated every Smash launch before it. The competitive fighting game’s launch, a month from then, was slated to be my highlight of the year. It was a sunny fall day in 2014 when Nintendo released its free demo for Super Smash Bros. Aside from my housemates and a couple of over-friendly acquaintances, I didn’t know a lot of people, and certainly none who’d play video games with me. It happened a year after I moved to New York. I tell this story a lot: I didn’t have much of a life before the Nintendo 3DS.