Beta64 - The 3DS and Nintendo's History with 3D

well hi there i've got a sponsorship for this episode it's baiyi do you like japan i like japan i was living in japan for a little over a month and while i was there i got really attached to snacks and when i got back to america you know what i couldn't find those snacks there's so many things that are exclusive to japan that i just couldn't get and i say couldn't because now i can with buyi you can go to many different sites like yahoo japan auctions then you just buy the stuff through buy they order the items let you know when they got it in and then depending on how much you want to pay they will ship the item to you and you'll be eating snacks and looking at your figurines and as little as one week later now to give it my seal of approval i decided to try out the service myself and bought long and large jagariko i also ordered 35 pounds of wall pepsi and a ring fitted venture map and if you want something from japan yourself you can use the link in the description to get 2 000 yen or around 20 off your first purchase and always remember with buy you can buy anything from [Music] the japan 3ds there it is it's a console that i did not have when it launched it was too expensive for me but i managed to get my hands on one in 2014 on craigslist it was scratched it was dirty but i put an animal crossing sticker on it so it looked kind of cute i eventually traded it for a new 3ds xl majora's mask edition but i do have a soft spot for the original model there's something about it that just makes me happy little did i know this system was considered by many on the development team to be impossible to make but it was through trial error blood sweat and tears that this console was able to be held in my hand today so on this episode of basics for we are going to look at the development the creation of the impossible handheld the nintendo 3ds to talk about the 3ds we have to go back in time to one of nintendo's first attempts at making 3d gaming a reality for the common folk no not the virtual boy i'm talking about the famicom 3d system released in 1987 and attached to the famicom expansion port these goggles featured an active liquid crystal shutter to make those 8-bit graphics really pop out at you pretty cool right well apparently it wasn't cool enough because it failed and never released outside of japan with only seven games supporting the accessory before it stopped production it turns out one of these games was the famicom grand prix 2 3d hot rally which was the first project that miyamoto and iwata worked on together and they would later work on the 3ds together too but that wasn't until many years later so why did this specific accessory fail well it seems that the criticism revolved a lot around the lackluster game offerings rapid flashing visuals and not to mention the 3d didn't really add much to the game so you're telling me i've got to put on this whole headset just to see my games like a little bit of depth and my neck oh all that added weight is just gonna tire out my poor neck if only there was something it could stand on like well a stand introducing the virtual boy eight years later in 1995 featuring full tennis ball hitting you directly in the face goodness goombae yokoy the father of the gameboy and many other legendary nintendo products was the main person behind the virtual boy but miyamoto did have some involvement since he was part of the group at nintendo that really wanted to see nintendo succeed with 3d but once it became time for the virtual boy to actually become a reality miyamoto was too busy with the nintendo 64 to be directly involved in fact the development of both of these consoles overlapped quite a bit which some would say led to the virtual boy's demise since you know why would i buy this 2d 3d console when i could get literal 3d but the thing was from miyamoto's point of view the nintendo 64 and the virtual boy weren't competing at all he saw the n64 as a way to usher in the new 3d gaming space head on while the virtual boy on the other hand was meant to be like a stepping stone to bring people who were used to 2d into the 3d world but it didn't really turn out that way they couldn't really do much 3d stuff other than wireframe models on the virtual boy and if mario was going to be on the system he needed to be recognizable not just a bunch of lines so all the games that had recognizable characters in them were made using 2d images and that made the virtual boy seem much less appealing as a 3d console honestly the console itself was made really to just be a fun toy to show your friends for you know a little bit before going to play something else and miyamoto was hoping nintendo wouldn't market it that way but with nintendo's history of being a toy company very much long gone by that point and not to mention miyamoto didn't really have any authority on the project so yeah it wasn't gonna happen instead of it being sold as a niche toy it was sold as the next big thing for gaming with a price tag of 179.99 at launch or around 323 dollars with inflation so you can kind of see why it failed i mean it was expensive it was being marketed as the successor to the game boy even though it really shouldn't have been and even if it was marketed as a toy i don't know if it would have helped sales that much i mean it would have helped people see it as less of a failure because it did sell 770 000 units but as a game console that's not very good and it certainly wasn't successful enough to launch the world into a 3d craze nintendo didn't give up though for years and years they kept trying to see if they could make 3d work with glasses-free 3d being the focus because those goggles just haven't really been working out for them around the office the two biggest advocates for 3d were miyamoto and yamauji who was then president of nintendo in fact one of yamauchi's missions in life was to make something in a game jump out at the player and the next attempt at that was with the gamecube which believe it or not includes 3d compatible circuitry even in the final version sent to store shelves but it's not like you can just tear apart a gamecube and somehow make it work what you need is a quote-unquote certain accessory put in and only then can you start displaying 3d images the main reason this was scrapped was because the special liquid crystal display or lcd it needed to display the 3d images was way too expensive back then in a perfect world nintendo wanted to make their own display that attached to the system and sell it for 3d use but it was becoming evident that it would most likely cost more than the system itself which wasn't going to work for them now if you've watched my video on luigi's mansion you probably already know that the game was meant to fully utilize 3d displays there was a build with 3d support already made good to go but it also got scrapped along with the display now here's a fun fact you may not know at e3 2002 miyamoto announced that sega was going to release a new version of fantasy star online for the gamecube featuring cards and to show it off they had the game running on a gamecube with a display on top and that screen was made by nintendo would attach to the gamecube itself and you would allow you to link up to four gamecubes together so that each person could get their own screen this technology is what inspired sega to make this card game version of fantasy star online so that way players could pick their cards in secret but nintendo had their own secret as well this screen supported glasses-free 3d but that feature wasn't disclosed until years later at the show was simply touted as a little display for your gamecube and was shown displaying metroid prime as well as wind waker and who knows what other games though it's not confirmed if they actually supported 3d like luigi's mansion did and that was the one and only time that we got to see the 3d lcd before it was scrapped forever but the gamecube wasn't the only attempt at 3d before the 3ds next it was the gameboy advance sp's turn to attempt it it used a special liquid crystal display similar to the gamecube accessory but this time built-in and it worked fine but nintendo ended up scrapping this just like the rest of them only because the resolution of the lcd was so low that even though worked it didn't look very good after all an image for the left eye and the right one had to be displayed on the same screen so you've got to make it high enough resolution or the effect is just going to look lackluster at best but it wasn't over yet nintendo just needed a break for a little bit during the ds and wii era there really wasn't any attempt to bring 3d to gaming but on the side miyamoto and yamauchi tried to bring 3d visuals to an exhibition they headed which covered the ogura anthology of 100 poems by 100 poets but that wasn't 3d in gaming sure you used a diaz to guide you through the exhibition but any and all attempts to make something jump out at the wizards was done in the real world not on any screen and now we've reached 2004. the release of the nintendo ds is here and while the developers at nintendo were hard at work making new games for the system um from nintendo research and engineering department had already made a complete soc design for their next hando console which it eventually would morph into the 3ds in case you don't know soc stands for system on a chip which is a single integrated circuit that includes all or most of the components that a computer or game system would need by the time the ds was released the system on a chip for the 3ds which it wasn't called the 3ds at the time had already reached a point where it could be considered a working design without any confirmation on what the new system would even be they hadn't even remotely considered 3d at the time all lumizu knew was that it had to be more powerful than the ds with a focus on making the graphics more on par with what home consoles were offering at the time but as a handout while making sure battery life would be awful so with the complete soc design written up and the d is having released umezu got to work on other aspects of the 3ds outside the soc like how many screens it would have the ds had dual screens obviously but umezu wasn't entirely sure that the public would even like it i mean the ds had barely been touched outside of nintendo's headquarters he even made a prototype of the 3ds with only one screen but after seeing people enjoying the dual screens of the ds he decided just to go for dual screens at least for now and by the latter half of 2007 an early incarnation of the 3ds soc had been made with a focus on high performance graphics with a little wiggle room so that way once developers started thinking about what they wanted in the new handheld there would be enough room to add their ideas and as it turns out that was the right call because 3d on the 3ds means that you're rendering three screens at once one for the touchscreen and then one for each of the eyes on the main screen plus since you have to display two images at once on the screen that halves the lcd backlight meaning that the brightness would have to be doubled and by the end of development all of that wiggle room was completely used up to keep that system going but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves aren't we let's focus on the summer of 2008 when things really started to take shape with 3ds just without the 3d since that feature nintendo had tried so hard to include with other consoles had been more or less forgotten by the majority of the development team and speaking of the development team back then nintendo really liked having their hardware and software teams working together on these projects and miyamoto had invited software developer hideki kono to be producer of the new handheld console and you may know this guy as the producer of mario kart wii director of luigi's mansion and the director of ice hockey all the way back on the nes he was approached by miyamoto just a bit after finishing mario kart wii and while he was still working on the nintendo dsi sound and even though he was still kind of catching his breath from his previous products he agreed to take on the role surprised he was even considered at all and began talking with umezu about the new console at that point along with other team members they locked down the idea for dual screens as well as some other features which needed to follow these three main goals the player must be able to carry the system with them connect to each other and get something new every day the first goal was accomplished by keeping the system small but also by making it where the system included a step counter and other such features that actually made people want to take the system with them to connect with others there was the addition of the friends list as well as street pass which lets you connect to people by simply walking past each other this feature was specifically kono's brainchild and you can find its origins in another game that he produced nintendogs though in that game you had to keep the game running in sleep mode to make it work this was referred to in the game as bark mode and was later evolved into tag mode which was included in animal crossing wild world and dragon quest nine the latter of which became kind of a social phenomenon in japan so much so that kono sun used it way more than he used the nintendog features dad created but now that kono was producing the console itself he wanted revenge so to speak he wanted to create something his son would use more than dragon quest he wanted a new tag mode that was bigger and better than before and they accomplished that by adding the feature into the system itself so that way would work whether the game was running or not now for the final goal of getting something new every day spot pass was created which sent you demos and videos to explore without having to search it out though in order to make this possible they would have to change the user's perspective on how to handle handouts usually when you're done with the game you'll turn off the system itself at least back then but for spot pass to work effectively they needed you to have the system on all the time in sleep mode so to make that more appealing they included the charging cradle with the system which also had the added benefit of making sure the system was always charged and ready to go in the morning and at that point that was the plan for the 3ds without 3d as a feature it was really just going to be a better more powerful ds with some nice added features we actually happen to have a photo of the system at this point this was the first model they made for the 3ds before it was 3d and without any cameras this was referred to as the minimum model which is what the team believed would be the minimal possible size for the system and honestly i'm actually kind of impressed how close they got and after this model was made things began moving forward as expected that is until a very specific meeting where the idea of 3d displays was finally brought up by an engineer on the project hey so uh what about trying 3d they said not having experienced the pain that many others in the room had felt from the failures of earlier attempts but the more the room thought about it the more they thought you know this could work i mean lcd displays were getting cheaper at higher resolutions the hardware specs looked like it could support the feature and they were working off the previously established ds so they really had time to focus on getting it right plus they were already kind of worried that the 3ds was just gonna be a ds again after all nintendo loves to make their stuff special then a 3d gaming console would be very very special not to mention with the display being built into the system they wouldn't have to worry about people spending money to buy a special display either that was it that was the moment this was what they were waiting for and miyamoto was set on it but as far as the rest of the team was concerned they kind of semi-agreed that it was the time for this it sure seemed like it was but for some people 3d was a touchy subject it wasn't so much that they were opposed to it it was more like they were very concerned and rightfully so even awada president of nintendo at the time thought this might be a bad move was it actually going to be possible to make 3d succeed in gaming or would people think it's cool and then get bored of it very quickly these were real concerns that needed to be answered so in order to answer them a prototype had to be made using the latest technology and so they got to work but it wasn't like i don't know a simple ball demo bouncing around to show hey you know 3d works it's cool i mean they did have a small visual demo to show mario and luigi in 3d but what really won people over was a special build of mario kart wii running on a wii with a 3d display connected to the main board and a 3d slider hot glued to a nunchuck now that 3d slider according to miyamoto was essential to the project to make sure that the player would be able to control just as much 3d as they wanted or no 3d at all everyone's eyes were different and to make sure it was easy to change on the fly a slider was added to the system's hardware itself instead of it being done in software miyamoto was very adamant that it had to be a slider it made it so that even if people found the 3d effect to be annoying they could easily turn it off and keep it off without having to go in any menus even if it took like a couple seconds to turn down the effect or disable it it would have caused much more distaste for the system allowing people to fine-tune that effect this precisely was a small addition but a brilliant one but mario kart wii wasn't the only 3d wii build shown off there was also a special build of wii sports golf and being able to see this all in action it was better than most people thought in fact it was really good and thusly it was decided the 3ds had to have 3d now what about the controls on this new system well it turns out that wasn't as easy of a question to answer as you might think it was worked on quite a bit the team wasn't really sure whether a d-pad would really be necessary if they added in an analog circle pad but eventually they decided to use a circle pad and a d-pad both on the left side of the console though it was still split down the middle whether or not the circle pad should be above the d-pad or the other way around so they made another prototype this time using a ds light console with physical blocks that you could use to swap the controls around in order to try out different configurations while running a special build of mario 64 ds but while both the d-pad and the circle pad made into the final version there were plans to add a second circle pad that never came about now they did end up releasing a circle pad pro accessory to add in the second pad anyway and later the seasick replaced this option on the new nintendo 3ds but for this video we're gonna stay focused on that regular launch 3ds and that launch 3ds includes something nintendo thought was just the coolest thing a 3d camera now you'd think adding a second camera for 3d photos wouldn't have been that big of a deal i mean these aren't like expensive cameras capable of super high resolution photos so adding two in should be easy right well no the problem lied with the lenses which needed their optical axis to be perfectly aligned with each other in order to make sure that the 3d effect of these photos worked well there needed to be some incredible precision here which made it quite a challenge for mass production not to mention they had to make sure that if you dropped it the lens wouldn't go out of alignment but adding too much reinforcement would also cut the internal wires not to mention all three cameras needed their wires to pass through the hinge and that at this point in development they weren't even sure if that was possible to do so what made them decide to try it anyway because simply 3d photos sounded way too much fun and you know they hoped it would make people happy so yeah why not let's give it a shot but there was always something in the back of a wada's mind at this time how are they going to market this handheld it really wasn't enough to say yo it's 3d it's cool it's radical oh it's fun too what makes people go wow this is actually kind of cool is trying it in person so you know what was coming up at this point e3 and to really set the stage for the 3ds's success it would have told the team that it was imperative to have working 3ds units at e3 2010 for attendees to try and prove that the 3d function was you know functional seguino manager of the 3ds design group was shocked at this and told a water that it was quote unquote absolutely impossible to do but but what knew this had to happen and he didn't care if it was actually in a 3ds shell or just in a giant freaking box it just had to work andu mezu got to work on a working soc with 3d functionality to be physically made in working order in time to build the units that was around january of 2010 and everyone was in a constant rush to get this all done before june it was considered by many to be the hardest part of the entire development process and it got even harder for a mezu when the idea of a gyro sensor was brought up in february and they had to add that in before e32 at that point in development the system already had an accelerometer in it but the idea of a gyro sensor came about whenever kono's department just so happened to be working on putting the gyro sensor of the wii motion plus accessory into a normal wii remote one day colonel walked in and showed off a demo of it working to a mezu isn't this cool he said and gosh dang it it was cool but the 3ds specs were supposed to be finalized already it's february march april may june that's four months away from e3 how on earth could they add this in before then but miyamoto was certain that it had to be put in just like he was certain that the wii remote needed a speaker so they decided just to try hoping just hoping they would make it in time at the other end of the office designs were coming in on what the 3ds would actually look like and the team was certain that the system just couldn't look like another ds it had to be unique it had to stand out but that was easier said than done during the presentation for how the system would look and feel a water rejected all six proposals for feeling way too much like a ds people needed to be able to tell this was a brand new system from the get-go not just another console revision like the ds light or the dsi so the team got back to work and now happened to be behind schedule fast forward one month featuring a lot of back and forth behind the scenes the design group finally came back to water with three designs that they believed were the best of the best and the one that was picked just so happened to be ejadas who worked on the design of the ds lite and the dsi while creating the 3ds's look and feel he wanted to try and break free from his past with the ds and attempted to achieve that by making the system look like it had three layers of different colors to show depth much like the 3d effect gave depth to the games it was also designed to give the system a different look depending on how you hold it thanks to a clear layer with iml or in-mould labeling being used on places like the buttons to keep a sleek film over the labeling with a kind of metallic feel to it now that came with its own set of issues like warping cracking shrinking wrinkling but it's fine the team will be able to figure out how to keep it from happening before release hopefully it all sounded super cool this no wonder was picked but being honest ejada wasn't even sure that this design could actually be made before e3 in fact akai who worked in the product engineering department flat out said that while it might be fine with a few units it was going to be impossible to mass produce later on due to the fact that the moles would likely wear down faster due to the stronger resin needed for the design to keep it from exploding into shards on impact and after going through all the resins they were considering using even the strongest one would still break on impact unless they made the system thicker not to mention the amount of facilities with the tech needed to make this thick system with iml and fiberglass infused resin was not a lot but they had to give it a shot this was the best looking design that they had and even if it was gonna be a challenge they were up for it and it wasn't until the end of february 2010 that they managed to fix many of the major issues including strengthening the hinge so that way it wouldn't end up like this so it's almost march now around four months until d3 and they finally were ready to start making a physical working version of the 3ds and that same month awada announced to the press the 3ds existence with details and a playable version of the console to follow at e3 and even though wada was totally fine with a simple prototype version to show at the show the team desperately wanted to show off all the work they had done with a full working version of the console at the show they all wanted this together and it became a pretty tight-knit group at this point when things seemed impossible yoneyama of the research and engineering department was there to say i'm sure we can do it and people relied on that sense of confidence now that's not to say he didn't want the best though when the first prototype of the system was made for e3 the buttons just didn't really feel very good to touch and he said for them to do it all over again the public needs our very best and that's what we're gonna give them and the team followed along and did just that in the end they managed to make it in time for e3 and they didn't just make a few working systems for the show they made 200 of them now they were exactly like the final product in fact they kept working on the circle pad well after e3 using different materials to give it that nice rubbery feel for added grip and the back of the system also wasn't really that done either but hey no one was able to see the back so it was fine what matters that people were able to try the system first hand attendees got to play games look at a bunch of 3d scenes some of which became street past puzzles later and they even got to check out some alternate colors for the system i don't remember that gold one ever being released at least looking like that i wish it had though that is sleek and now with the show over and done with finally it was time to start focusing on completing the system software features which had been in development for about a year at this point as planning for the software began around june of 2009 for the 3ds they wanted to follow in the same footsteps as the wii where the included stuff in the system would be there so that way anyone who picks it up can find some fun in it even if you don't own any games or don't consider yourself a gamer and they came up with a lot of ideas that they wanted to include so much so that they actually had to narrow it down quite a bit but one of the main things they definitely wanted to do was improve the whole menu the dsi was a step in the right direction of what they wanted but on that home menu you could only see up to 5 icons at once so with the 3ds they wanted you to be able to see a lot more to do this they borrowed an idea from the wii photo channel which lets you see a bunch of pictures at once and then made a prototype for the 3ds based on that bam now you can see a whopping 60 icons at once if you really wanted to along the top of the screen they chose to include a few general functions they wanted to be easy to reach like game memos to take notes the notifications list was meant to be a beefier wii message board for messages from nintendo and other games and then there's the friends list which was a massive improvement over the ds where you actually had to register friends for each game separately now you can make people friends complete with me's and one general list that could be used with any game this was an idea they wanted to implement a long time before and now with the next generation upon us it was the perfect time now what about the games i'm talking ar games i'm talking face raiders both of these games came about because the 3ds development team felt like the system needed something like how the wii had we play they wanted to create a 3ds play so to speak but this time as individual software on the home menu and there were many ideas about what games to include but they decided to focus on just two of them to really polish them up with the help of other teams like those over at hal laboratory so first let's talk about ar games which was made by the entertainment analysis and development department or ead and believe it or not they had been working on this project for quite a while now long before the 3ds was even a thing they made demos with this ar functionality and they were cool but not really much of a game and they didn't have any hardware they particularly wanted to run the software either they tried it out on the dsi but all they did was show a 3d model on a card and that was it still they were proud of it and showed it off to miyamoto who told them this isn't really a game what what even is this where would we put this but kawamoto who ended up directing ar games later on saw the technology as something more and once it was decided that 3d would be added to the 3ds and that they wanted some games included kawamoto got to work with his team to turn the ar tech into ar games from what i can tell it was pretty smooth sailing from this point getting things put together up until the end see originally the question mark card was the only card they were going to be using the problem was that it looked a lot like the question mark block from mario and when miyamoto saw it he was like oh mario comes out of this right no but we we can add it we can we can add it days were counting down pretty darn quick at this point so they scrambled to make more cards featuring popular nintendo characters and in the end they felt it was definitely worth the trouble on the side they also found time to make a giant ar card for life-size me's just for the fun of it and immediately after trying it out iwada said that it was too good to not have it be mass-produced and thusly it was set to become a club nintendo item with the normal wallet size cards being included with the system itself now we move on to face raiders which was made get this for fun with a little inspiration from the game boy camera which came with its own mini games featuring faces basically they wanted to make face raiders be the joke game of the built-in software the punch line that makes you laugh and go what what is this in the game they included every funny face trick that they could think of but then a little frustration happened the merge lens this funny little feature added to the 3ds camera lets you merge two people and it came about because nintendo's cooperation with intelligent systems the camera team wanted to include facial recognition in the software and to test it out they asked intelligent systems to experiment switching people's faces using the inner and outer cameras at the same time to make it easier to snap the photos with this in mind intelligent systems came back with a prototype that would eventually become merged lens and it was so freaking funny and why did this frustrate the face raiders team well it should be obvious it's because they didn't want to be out funnied they were the ones making the funny face software gosh dang it so at the very end of the development they added a new feature where if you're playing and someone's face is in view of the outer lens it has the ability to put their face in the game too just like that so players would think what i didn't take that photo how did that happen not to mention they could also use the funniest of the merged lens by having it abruptly put merge faces into the games too that's double the funny this sort of friendly rivalry wasn't too uncommon around the office since a lot of the team ended up working on the same floor walking around the office checking out what other people had done showing off what they'd done it created a real camaraderie amongst the team and they also just genuinely enjoyed working together too now even though those two built-in games got quite a bit of focus put into them there was one piece of built-in software that received the most attention me maker in 2009 nintendo attempted to bring mies over to the ds with the japanese exclusive game tomodachi collection whose sequel you probably recognize as tomodachi life on the ds though you didn't have any me maker software built in so you would have to make all of your mis from scratch in the game or go through the transferring process through the wii but for the 3ds nintendo wanted to have miese take a more central role so they wanted a meme maker put directly in the system so that way games from the console could pull from a pool of me's that you made on your system and that is exactly what they did with the addition of some new features like the ability to stretch different parts of the face along with new facial features entirely to allow more variations than what were available on the wii and ds that way you had a better chance of making a meet that looked closer to the way you look in real life or you could just use the new tools to make it even more curse me it's up to you i will say though the main point of the software was to make me's of yourself and your friends which is why they added in the photo to me feature at first this feature was just supposed to allow users to take a photo of themselves and view it side by side with me creator but once they showed it to miyamoto he said huh you know it'd be nice if it automatically made the mies from the photos but i don't know how that would work and they didn't know how that would work either but sure as heck were going to try anyway and they were not getting very far with it dang but then out of the blue a company came in to show off to nintendo a system that they had made which automatically creates portraits based on photos of people's faces the timing was impeccable and they added in that feature into the 3ds but there was a bit of a snag with it it took roughly half a minute for it to actually generate the me and that was the best that they could do so in order to make the weight more bearable they did a cute little animation to help pass the time now the results of this weight can be a bit iffy but they figured this is more about giving people a starting point that they could work from it was their goal to make it as quick as possible to get a mead that looked kind of similar to you instead of having someone stare at the tool being overwhelmed and like yeah i'm just gonna go for the default me and going hand in hand with this big focus on the me maker there was also a big focus on the street pass me plaza from very early on as i've said there was a plan to bring tag mode to the next level in the system by making it where software wouldn't need to be inserted to use this feature since it was built into the system itself but what about people who didn't have any software that used it then they can't use this feature that we've worked so hard on well why don't we have it where the me's that we worked hard on were part of street pass like having a me plaza full of actual people you happen to walk by that sounds like a great original idea well it turns out it wasn't an original idea this was actually in development for the dsi as a separate game called traveling me allowing you to play games with your mies that you collect via tag mode but because of the limitations at the time which would be around 2007 you'd have to keep the game on at all times to collect the moves from people you pass and it just didn't sound like that good of an idea then especially as a full retail game so the idea was shelved then there was also me parade on the wii which was another inspiration for street pass me plaza i'll admit as a kid i never understood what this parade was apparently you could view random me's from the internet see these from people you've played online with in certain games plus me's from friends we remotes could appear here too but for the street past me plaza they were going to take it to the next level having mies from people you actually pass in real life in one big plaza sounds cool right and it is but is that it just a place to look at all the me's you've collected from strangers i mean the team thought it was cool but just not engaging enough to make the miese feel less like strangers they added in the ability to add a custom greeting for you know some uniqueness it was better but still not super interesting okay what about allowing you to add your own custom music to a street pass playlist via the nintendo 3ds music app some way you can see what music is popular around here that's cool yeah okay okay okay but what if we took the idea from travelingme and made a few games to use these me's with that'd be pretty sweet and engaging too and one of the first ideas they had was a game get this where do you collect as many miss as possible that's it now there was another idea to make a game where players would try and pass by the same person several times and both those ideas actually became plaza launch games though heavily expanded on the first idea became straight past puzzle or puzzle swap where you collected puzzle pieces from people you passed to complete 3d pictures and the other idea turned into street pass quest or find me an rpg featuring the me's that you collect and if you just so happen to pass the same person several times it levels up their me to become stronger not to mention the passing the same person idea went a step further in the me plaza itself allowing the user to write a special message for specific people and if they ever pass each other again it'll give it to them iwata actually used this feature to help cheer on some of the nintendo development team while they were still finishing up the 3ds mizuki from the network software department group of the network business department actually got a special message from awada after a meeting that they had together that said do your best on the matter we discussed i'm rooting for you it's that kind of work environment that kept everyone moving forward to create something truly special for everyone to enjoy and with that things began wrapping up and nintendo eagerly awaited how the public would take on the 3ds would it be a massive hit would it be a flop would 3d catch on and become a new standard for gaming in the future they didn't know but not knowing can be kind of exciting and in early 2011 the 3ds hit store shelves for 250 to mostly positive reviews and it's sold pretty okay at launch and by okay i mean it was the best-selling nintendo handheld console launch day they had ever had at least in the us but the problem started to creep up in the following months once they realized that sales were already starting to slow there just wasn't enough launch games to really sell people on it as a gaming console yet and nintendo themselves were still having the issue of how to get the 3ds across to the consumer like oh it looks cool please try it they had done events to let people try it out but it just wasn't enough and over fears of this being a gigantic loss for the company who was already reporting a 485 million operating loss they decided to cut the price of the system less than six months after launch and it worked the 3ds's price was brought down to 170 and sales of the 3ds increased by more than 260 percent and around eight months after the system's release it had already surpassed the sales of the original ds in its first year crisis averted all right believe it or not now we have seven minutes worth of content talking about unused stuff in the 3ds system itself i'm talking home menu settings app including built-in software that was available on launch day now you might not think there's a lot of stuff to talk about here but there is some pretty interesting things starting with the symbol list in system settings where there are some strange pieces of text for instance we've got listings for windows mobile xbox playstation and xbox 360. all located in the system settings executable file system why they're here well they're likely just debugging symbols but that doesn't exactly explain why they're here i don't know of any link between the 3ds and the xbox and playstation stuff it's kind of to be honest just a mystery and that's really it for unused text but as far as graphics go oh boy there are a ton of placeholder ones like these for face raiders with this face in particular being used on the home menu banner if you don't have any safe photos but in the game it's called dummy face 128 and inside me maker we've got a bunch of place order images meant for me's qr codes that are just blank plus two more blank images and uh the rest of them are just eyes all of which are called some form of dummy in the game's files now i will say that though this eye is green it was not actually meant to be that way in the game all of the used eyes are green as well they're just made white once they're put in game and the blue part is changed to whatever color you want the mii's eyes to be for the nintendo 3ds camera there's an unused 3d picture in there that was meant for testing purposes it's a freaking rhinoceros skull from the tennoji zoo in osaka and was taken with a fujifilm fine pix real 3d w1 camera on march 29 2009 and then edited in on august 12 2010 likely to begin using it to test the 3ds software with street pass me plaza once again only looking at games that were there at launch we've got quite a few unused stuffs like for puzzle swap which has an interesting unused feature that allowed a puzzle to contain 540 pieces the pieces are so small in fact that if you try to do it in game it will only show a question mark on the puzzle select screen but once you select it you can see all the puzzle pieces you need to collect to finish it and if collecting 540 pieces wasn't hard enough they're all pink which means the only way to get those pieces by getting one randomly when the puzzle is unlocked or by passing by someone or receiving someone from spy pass who already has the piece basically this would take forever to complete and speaking of pink puzzle pieces here are some unused layouts for them that actually seem possible to complete and while there are puzzles you can get that don't have any pink pieces in them like these three the versions that are used are actually in a different format now for the general meet plaza part of street pass me plaza we've also got some unused graphics for placeholder icons for 3ds and ds games and then there's this 3d test image for plants and a debug font too there also happens to be some maps for brazil chile colombia mexico and panama and were very likely meant to color the regions of people that you met in street pass but the maps aren't complete they're missing the lines that separate the region so none of these were used but there are complete maps for china hong kong taiwan and south korea but they all go unused just the same and if none of that seemed all that interesting to you get ready there are some very interesting unused graphics and other things in the nintendo zone app and yes i do know that this app wasn't released until several months after the launch of the 3ds but i'm going to include in this video anyway because it technically existed in the launch 3ds 1.0.0 system menu but there was no way to actually use it first things we'll look at are some general unused graphics like a bunch of flags an icon that says dummy on it a place or icon for stamps in the paint plugin and an unused thumbnail that shows a screenshot for the japanese version of nintendo zone but you'll notice that it says ds on it even though it's obviously a 3ds screen size not to mention every single button here is almost identical to the ds version of the nintendo zone viewer app which could be activated on the system via ds download play or if you get close enough it'll just show up on your dsi home menu much like how it was on the 3ds back when it first launched before a software update made it always available now the button on the bottom doesn't look very similar but that's just because the ds version i'm showing isn't connected to a macuda diaz hotspot now what is makudius well it's actually a surface started in 2009 between mcdonald's and nintendo which allowed ds gamers to connect to mcdonald's to get games news and food coupons now once the 3ds release you still could connect to those macho ds places though it would be the same screen size as the ds i say all this because this unused thumbnail is basically just a copy of the ds version of the viewer app meaning that this is a very early screenshot of the developers attempting to port the app to the 3ds okay i have saved the best for last i'm talking about this unused graphic in the nintendo zone viewer app which is just of you know raccoon mario and superbrothers3 but this is part of a bigger unused finding there is a hidden debug menu in the nintendo zone viewer that is specifically made for the localization team and themed around super mario bros 3 and i have it working right here so this is the nintendo zone viewer app it doesn't really like work anymore but i edited the files to add this little button like right over there if you tap it it links us to super localization bros this fun little place includes lots of links like to the paint plugin which has a 999 second time limit to draw just whatever you can't send it to anyone it will ask you to and then just no next up there's the media player plugin which will play mo flex files and there aren't any here so it doesn't work you know i probably should have just said outright that most of the stuff here doesn't work there's some things that look like they can be tapped but but you can but if you go to the bottom you can tap here to go to the top nice and last but certainly not least we've got two hidden functions built into the 3ds itself that i'd like to talk about these aren't functions hidden in the home menu these are features so ingrained in the system they have to be activated on boot so the first feature is kinda hard for me to show off in short if you hold down the start select and x button while pressing the power button it allows your 3ds to boot from a ds cartridge but there are two big caveats to this one you have to do all of this while the system is closed how well to do that you could just hold a magnet over the system sensor to trick it and think it's closed that solves that problem pretty easily but that brings us to our second thing you can't boot game cartridges see this feature allows you to do one thing execute firmware from a ds cartridge so this is very useful if you happen to have a brick system because it's possible to put firmware files on a ds flash guard and get the system to boot again but as far as something cool that i can show you right now yeah no now the second hidden feature i can show you all you need is a completely wiped factory reset nintendo 3ds and again just any game of your choosing first make sure it's powered off plug in your 3ds game into the back don't drop it now just hold a b x y r and then power and watch what happens what what's this this isn't the setup this is the game that's right by holding down all these buttons and pressing power you're able to boot up the game directly without having to set up the system at all now this does cause some weirdness though some things just don't work correctly for instance you can't use any me's you can't use the friends list you can't use street pass you can't use freaking internet and not to mention the games themselves have like some weirdness to them when you do this for instance i booted up professor leighton vs phoenix right ace attorney and booting it under this mode uh your save data dies now when you're done playing your game all you got to do is press the home button which simply turns the system off this functionality was likely added for nintendo repair senders so that way they could boot from a diagnostic card or something to check the system out without having to set it up though i guess it could also be used for kiosks too you know if you want to like put it out at gamestop but you don't want to set up the system you could just boot into the cartridge like normal granted you would have to disable the home button so people couldn't turn it off well whatever it was meant to be for it's a cool little thing you can try yourself and show off your friends except your save file might get permanently deleted you might want to watch out for that one and that's the nintendo 3ds a system that was thought quite literally to be impossible to produce at least on a massive scale like they needed them to be but here's the thing it was thanks to the hard work and dedication of so many people on the 3ds team that made this a reality not to mention all the people who attempted to bring 3d to gaming for years before this it's thanks to all of them that something truly special was made in a lot of ass interviews you can really sense just how much this project meant to people there are thank yous just thrown out left and right of people saying oh this dude helped me with this i couldn't make it if it wasn't for this guy you literally kept me going i really think it's important not just to look at the hardware the software what's unused in this system it's also really important to learn about just the people behind it that's what interests me the most about the 3ds and this is why i just really really appreciate this system now i don't know what the future holds this could be the last nintendo dedicated handout console and if it is well good on you guys you went out with a bang nintendo switching [Music] hey i'm just gonna say thank you to like for watching the video for watching my streams being a patron just all of you you've been very very kind to me so thank you for for everything and uh i'll see you next time

Channel: Beta64

Views: 439,116

Keywords: beta, beta64, beta 64, 3ds, 3d, ds, nintendo, iwata, iwata-san, virtual boy, famicom 3d system, 3d system, famicom, wii, 3d wii, gamecube, gc, streetpass, konno, miyamoto, history, making, making of, miis, mii maker, ar games, face raiders, games, creation, proto, prototype, early, ds lite, dsi, 3ds xl, new 3ds xl, new 3ds, original, e3, e3 2010, 2010, 2011, nintendo zone, super localization, unused, scrapped, tcrf, story, interview, lcd, luigi's mansion, luigi, mario kart, wii u, nes, gameboy, n64, nintendo 64

Id: ho7eawHlcoo

Length: 49min 2sec (2942 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021