Nintendo had tried 3D before, and it had not gone well. The Famicom 3D System used shutter glasses and never left Japan. The Virtual Boy in 1995 sold fewer than a million units, with only 22 games ever released for it. After that, plenty of people inside Nintendo doubted 3D gaming would ever work.
They kept poking at it anyway. The GameCube could display true stereoscopic 3D with an LCD attachment that was never released, and Luigi's Mansion was the only game ever designed for it. A 3D screen was tested for the Game Boy Advance SP and shelved. So when Nintendo announced the Nintendo 3DS on March 23, 2010, it was the third serious try. This time, there would be no glasses.
3D without the glasses
The full reveal came at E3 on June 15, 2010, on an elaborate stage with moving set pieces. The first game shown was Kid Icarus: Uprising, and Nintendo also played 3D trailers for movies like Tangled on the little screen. When reviews came, IGN called the 3D effect "impressively sharp and clean."
The trick was in the top screen. It used a parallax barrier to show 3D without glasses, with a "3D Depth Slider" beside it to turn the effect up, down or off. Below sat a touchscreen in the old DS shape, and there was a new round analog nub called the Circle Pad. Three cameras came along too, two on the outside for 3D photos.
The catch was you. The 3D only worked if you held the system at the right distance and angle. Lean a little and the effect fell apart. The 3DS posture went like this: elbows tucked, head perfectly still, like a person trying not to spill soup.
Four hundred thousand in a day
The hype was real. Amazon UK said the 3DS was its most pre-ordered video game system ever, and Nintendo of America said pre-orders were double what the Wii had done.
The 3DS launched in Japan on February 26, 2011, at ¥25,000, and sold its entire allotment of 400,000 units amid reports of major queues outside shops. Europe followed on March 25 and sold 303,000 in the first two days. In the UK, 113,000 went in the opening weekend, Nintendo's most successful hardware launch there. North America got it on March 27 for US$249.99 and bought 440,000 in its first week.
Then the trouble started. That price was the highest ever for a Nintendo handheld, when the original DS had launched at $150 in 2004. The 3D effect could tire your eyes, and Nintendo warned that the 3D mode was not meant for children six and younger, citing possible harm to their vision. That is an awkward thing to print on a Nintendo product. The launch lineup also lacked any flagship Nintendo series. By March 31, 2011, the 3DS had sold 3.61 million units, short of the 4 million Nintendo had projected.
Your own face as the enemy
What every 3DS did have, straight out of the box, was a pile of strange little toys. AR Games came with six paper cards, five showing Mario, Link, Kirby, Pikmin and Samus, and one showing a question mark block. Point the camera at a card on your kitchen table and real-time graphics appeared on top of the live picture.
Face Raiders was even stranger. To start, you took photos of people's faces. Those faces then became enemies that attacked you, and you shot them by moving the whole console around, using the gyroscope. If someone walked through the background, the game grabbed their face and added them as enemies too. It turned your little brother and total strangers into floating targets in your living room. Nobody asked for this. It was wonderful.
The green light
The feature that changed how people carried the console was StreetPass. A 3DS in sleep mode could find other 3DS systems nearby and swap data without you doing anything, and when it had found someone, a little light glowed green.
That green light became a habit. We left the house with the 3DS in our bags just in case. In StreetPass Mii Plaza, the people you passed showed up as Mii visitors, up to ten at a time, and you used them to play minigames like Puzzle Swap, where each stranger might hand you a missing piece of a 3D picture. It was social networking for people who did not want to talk to anyone, and it was perfect.
Nintendo leaned into it. In 2013 it announced StreetPass Relay, planning to turn over 29,000 Wi-Fi access points in the US into relay stations, so you could pick up other players' data at a relay point even when they had long gone home. The relays shut down worldwide on March 28, 2018, apart from Best Buy locations in Canada.
The price cut
Five months after launch, Nintendo blinked. On July 28, 2011, it announced a price cut of nearly a third, to US$169.99 in North America and ¥15,000 in Japan. The people who had paid full price got something back through the 3DS Ambassador Program: 20 free classic games for anyone who logged into the eShop before August 21. Ten were NES games like Super Mario Bros. and Metroid. Ten were Game Boy Advance games like The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap.
In the same year Satoru Iwata voluntarily halved his own salary. The cut worked fast: sales rose more than 260 percent over a comparable 19-day stretch.
Mario saves Christmas
The real rescue was software. Super Mario 3D Land arrived in November 2011 and brought back the Tanooki suit from Super Mario Bros. 3. It sold over 343,000 copies in its first week in Japan and helped move over 145,000 consoles. It went on to sell 12.88 million, and it was the first 3DS game to pass five million.
Mario Kart 7 followed and became the best-selling 3DS game, with 18.99 million units. About 8 months after launch, Nintendo of America said the 3DS had already passed the original DS's first year in sales. Over the 2011 holidays it sold about 1.6 million in Japan, and Nintendo sold 11.4 million 3DS units worldwide that year. The console that had started so badly ended its first year looking like a Nintendo handheld again.
A museum guide and a long goodbye
The 3DS got into places nobody expected. From 2012, the Louvre in Paris used it for audioguides, and Nintendo later built a whole visitor guide with over 30 hours of audio and over 1,000 photographs of the art. You could rent a 3DS XL at the museum and look at the Mona Lisa through the device you also used to play Mario Kart. The Louvre retired those guides in September 2025.
Nintendo shipped 75.94 million units in total and discontinued the family on September 16, 2020. The 3D screen was always a little fussy, and Nintendo itself ended up selling the 2DS, a version with the 3D taken out. That was never really the point. The point was the green light, and the odd feeling that a stranger on the bus had just handed you a puzzle piece.
