Nintendo have a penchant for going against the grain. While everyone else was busily integrating Facebook and Twitter sharing, they instead built their own walled garden social network to connect 3DS and Wii U players together. Miiverse was a niche feature and easily ignored, but when it was integrated into games in a meaningful way, it was brilliant. Splatoon let players create and share little messages and drawings – something that Splatoon 2 retains – Super Mario Maker let you leave place notes and markers, and it also allowed the sharing of screenshots and little status updates.
Of course, the Switch abandoned Miiverse in favour of Twitter and Facebook, and it’s down to the game whether it wants to retain the same functionality – Splatoon 2’s drawings are still a lovely part of the main hub. As of November last year, Nintendo shut the service down, and while you can request your own creations to preserve them yourself, the huge catalogue of messages was all but gone.
Until now. Archive Team, a loose organisation built around the desire to preserve internet history before it’s lost, have built archiverse.guide as a searchable repository for the 17 terabytes of data they were able to grab from Nintendo via Internet Archive.
While not complete, they’ve pulled and preserved:
- 216,901,986 Replies
- 133,003,599 Posts
- 75,955,135 Screenshots
- 72,135,190 Drawings
- 30,600,505 Avatars
- 8,278,693 User Profiles
- 2,238,830 Deleted and Hidden Posts
- 5,128 Game Communities
This is just a historical artefact at this point, looking to save what was, as opposed to relaunching the service. It’s still fun to search through, whether trying to find your own posts or revisit the creations from a particular game.
Source: archiverse.guide
