Animal Crossing will forever be a kids game that changed my life profoundly, and twice. Like most of us, Animal Crossing got me through Covid19. It was such a strange time to be locked in and spending 10 hours of every day working on collecting and manicuring your town. I remember my sister and I really bonded over this game, and there were many days where my mom and dad watched us play.
But aside from a worldwide pandemic, I remember the first time Animal Crossing changed my perspective was when I was ~13? I had grown up with a GameShark on the Gameboy Color, but years later my next exposure to hacking was on the Nintendo DS playing online in Animal Crossing. Had some random person I made friends with on the Nintendo forums join our small group of friends to travel between towns. This person could do some impossible things! They'd dig rivers, spawn-in objects, and I still have a vivid memory of them making the game rain items on balloons like some festive meteor shower.
I remember at that time you'd hear horror stories about hackers coming in and destroying peoples' towns. I did hear about abuse. I liked my (Ukrainian?) friend who would show up and help us make impossible towns with rivers that went in circles and showed us game assets we'd likely never have discovered on our own.
I'm a PC gamer now, and I avoid consoles for the lock-in and control companies like Nintendo exert over its players. I understand why they do it but I feel like the experiences I had could never happen today.
Whoever that was started me on a career of game modding and software development and I'm glad I got to meet them while it was possible.
I ditched them after the way they unceremoniously killed off the Wii U and 3DS Miiverse almost immediately after switch released. Miiverse was a massive part of Wii U's experience, so it was a pretty big punch to the gut when it suddenly went away in 2017. the main menu on Wii U is populated with dozens of randomly chosen miis running around and "discussing" games by displaying speech bubbles with Miiverse posts and it also integrated the Miiverse directly into several games. For the last 8 years that's all been replaced with generic, fake miiverse posts that are hardcoded into the firmware as a fallback for when the internet isn't working. Any game that previously had miiverse functionality lost it in summer 2017, less than five years after the Wii U's release.
Super Mario Maker (September 2015) actually became nigh-unplayable less than two years after its release because it relied on Miiverse to share levels with other players. You can still make your own levels and not share them with anyone, but being able to share your levels online with other players was a significant part of that game.
And that's on top of the fact that anything you buy from Nintendo's many online "eshops"/"shop channels" (there's literally a new online store+account system for every console!) will be destroyed within a decade because they don't think of you as a customer anymore once they have your money.
BTW another great example of how much Nintendo screwed over their most loyal customers: prior to the switch's announcement, preview of Breath of the Wild had a minimap on the Wii U's controller but that was removed in the final release because they didn't want the Wii U version to have an advantage over the Switch port.
I'm not sure it was as massive as people consider if they decided to discontinue it. Any time I checked it was people posting the same 2 "I love games my dad beats me" and "Y can't metroid crawl" memes over and over
There were those but there were also a lot of surprisingly high-effort drawings; Archiverse (https://archiverse.pretendo.network/) has a lot of them archived. It wasn't in any way dead or unpopular.
And if people weren't using it, then why would they backport it to the 3DS three years after release?
And the worst part is, it was still young when they ended it. The Wii U wasn't even five years old and there were still games coming out with miiverse integration a year before it ended. And ultimately Nintendo were the ones who decided to make this into a central feature of their platform. They didn't have to sell people a twitter clone if they didn't even intend to support it for the duration of a single game-console generation. They didn't have to populate the home-menu of the Wii U with miiverse posts or make it central to games like splatoon and mario maker only to end it less than two years from release date.
I have a fond memory of playing Mario Kart Wii online with my brother when I was a kid, and we ran into into a clearly hacking player who was just constantly spamming items, permanently invincible, etc.
Thankfully hackers weren’t common when I played so it felt like seeing a unicorn in the wild.
But aside from a worldwide pandemic, I remember the first time Animal Crossing changed my perspective was when I was ~13? I had grown up with a GameShark on the Gameboy Color, but years later my next exposure to hacking was on the Nintendo DS playing online in Animal Crossing. Had some random person I made friends with on the Nintendo forums join our small group of friends to travel between towns. This person could do some impossible things! They'd dig rivers, spawn-in objects, and I still have a vivid memory of them making the game rain items on balloons like some festive meteor shower.
I remember at that time you'd hear horror stories about hackers coming in and destroying peoples' towns. I did hear about abuse. I liked my (Ukrainian?) friend who would show up and help us make impossible towns with rivers that went in circles and showed us game assets we'd likely never have discovered on our own.
I'm a PC gamer now, and I avoid consoles for the lock-in and control companies like Nintendo exert over its players. I understand why they do it but I feel like the experiences I had could never happen today.
Whoever that was started me on a career of game modding and software development and I'm glad I got to meet them while it was possible.