Miiverse is dead, long live… well, I guess that’s just the end of it.
Today, Nintendo shut down Miiverse forever. It was a wonderful little social media experiment that let Wii U and 3DS users share thoughts, drawings, and screenshots of games. Nintendo also used it for special promotional events, and it was a valuable avenue for communicating with smaller game developers.
Of course, Twitter does all that, and from your phone, so.
Miiverse wasn’t perfect, but it did add a lot to Nintendo and video games culture. It gave rise to many memes, like “Y Can’t Metroid Crawl?” It provided us with one of the best Twitter accounts ever, @BadMiivesePost. And of course, there were the completely mind-boggling things on there like the always delightful Miiverse Water Guy.
If you were so inclined, Nintendo offered a download of all your Miiverse posts up until last night, but I didn’t opt in. I felt it was better to just let it all go, rather than have another meaningless file to stick in a folder somewhere and forget about. It’s not like I had any especially insightful or funny posts, anyhow.
Honestly, I think the memories of how exciting Miiverse was at first are more important than the actual posts. It was a cool new feature to a cool new game console (which ended up being a dud for most), and I’m sure that I’ve spent much more time scrolling through Miivese posts than I ever will spend with the Twitter app. Oh well! It was a fun ride, but nothing lasts forever.
I think most of all, I’ll miss all the dick drawings that pop up after a game in Nintendo Land.