Over the past year, YouTuber Jirard ‘The Completionist’ Khalil spent $22,791 and countless hours buying and downloading every game on the Wii U and 3DS eShop before both services shut down later this month. -this. It’s a foolish quest that no one should ever undertake. But according to video game historians, it could also be the only legal way to preserve one of these games for years to come.
Last year, Nintendo announced that it would be closing the Wii U and 3DS eShops on March 27, 2023, just like the original Wii Shop Channel closed in 2019. You’ll still be able to download any game you want. d previously purchased from these stores for the foreseeable future, but if you want to add to your digital library after that time, you’re out of luck. And as we have seen with these digital Wii games, you may not be able to count on the constant availability of these downloads even before they are officially closed.
Completionist’s video of the whole effort to buy all of these games is documented in the video below, and it’s worth watching just for the ridiculous obstacles that get in the way of buying these games as an end user. . Digital stores no longer accept credit cards, so you must purchase physical eShop cards from retail stores. Retail stores have security measures in place to prevent you from purchasing thousands of dollars in gift cards. Nintendo will only let you keep a balance of $250 in your account, so you have to slowly redeem those cards one by one. The Wii U will only allow you to keep a certain number of games installed at a time, regardless of the available storage space. And the list goes on and on.
Khalil was able to do all of this because he had a team behind him for long hours, and as a well-known YouTuber, he was able to offset some of this absurd expense by accepting additional sponsorships. Time and money are precious resources, and they are resources of which organizations like the Video Game History Foundation (opens in a new tab) do not have endless supplies. Admirably, Khalil intends to donate these consoles and storage devices to VGHF, and the group already has plans, or at least hopes, how to turn them into a legally accessible video game library.
The elephant in the room, of course, is that all of these games have already been “preserved” and made available to anyone who wishes to access them, illegally. In the minds of players who don’t mind breaking the law, talking about “losing” games is nonsense. Preservation is effectively problem solved, because it’s no secret that all of these games are already out there in the darkest corners of the internet, right?
Well, this line of thinking becomes a problem for historians who are striving to see that access to these games is no longer illegal. Ars Technica (opens in a new tab) published an article last week explaining how VGHF and other groups are trying to create an online library that allows you to legally verify digital games for online play, but lobbyists from the games industry oppose it. . idea, despite the fact that libraries already allow the borrowing of other types of media such as books and films.
(Image credit: Jirard Khalil)
The Wii U and 3DS libraries that Khalil has built, contained in the consoles and storage media pictured above, will be stored with VGHF, though for now all the organization can do with them is invite scholars and historians to its physical location to watch the games. But the organization is making its own effort to change the law to allow wider access to these games.
VGHF co-director Kelsey Lewin said in Blood (opens in a new tab) that “there is something very important that we are working to change (with the great people at Software Preservation Network). Do you know how to rent e-books and movies from libraries? Not just locally, but places like archive.org. Well, you should also be able to rent video games this way. Using emulation, even!“
In other words, the VGHF aims to change the law so that the lending libraries of these digital games can be made public. But even if the organization succeeds in changing the law so it can lend out digital games, copyright holders might still be angry if the library’s games are obtained through legal means. As Lewin explains, “The specific problem that Jirard’s quest solves here is that WHEN those laws change…they’ll need clean, bulletproof, legally obtained ROMs to begin with.”
Do I think owners of Nintendo or other platforms should be rewarded for their anti-conservation decisions? Surely not. It sucks! Nobody should have to do what Jirard did, it’s crazy! (And you better believe we’ll use that argument to help change the laws!)March 20, 2023
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Again, a history foundation is spending its time lobbying for a legal change that would allow it to create a public library of video games, and the only reason it has the ability to include 3DS and Wii digital games U in this library is because a YouTuber spent over $20,000 and a year of effort archiving all of these titles before their legal access was removed.
This is hot shit. The industry is actively lobbying against historic preservation efforts even as it continues to cut off legitimate means of accessing its classic library. Nintendo is closing its old stores, Sony and Microsoft are playing chicken doing the same, and publishers like EA are cutting off access to their old library piece by piece. Microsoft seems to be alone in wanting to make an effort to make its library easily accessible to modern audiences – after all, the Xbox Game Pass push benefits greatly from a comprehensive catalog – but even that is far from a complete overview of the game. history of Xbox. .
In this particular case, Nintendo might choose to give historians access to a catalog of its digital library, but it won’t, likely because its lawyers have decided that tight control of its intellectual property is more important. than any civic support for preservation. Historians and activists have access to far fewer resources than the corporations that control legal access to these games, and it’s terrifying to see the fiery hoops they have to jump through just to attempt to make things better for the future.
If you want to do some last minute shopping, these are the 10 games to download before the Wii U and 3DS eShops close.