The Nintendo 3DS Family of Systems
Image: Damien McFerran / Nintendo Life

Call us nostalgic, but the closure of the 3DS eShop has us reminiscing about the many incredible years of portable gaming we've enjoyed with Nintendo's last dedicated handheld console and its wider family.

Recently, we've been downloading various gems we missed over the years and it's given us a chance to take stock of our collections. Looking back, the depth and breadth of this console's library is quite astonishing. From your franchise tentpoles to your experimental curios, from colossal third-party hits to indie darlings and intriguing apps, Switch may well have the quality to match — it's certainly got the quantity — but the sheer variety of gameplay experiences available on 3DS is still unbeatable in our books.

Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube764k
Watch on YouTube

From the beautiful gloss finish of the launch models to the smooth, curvy-edged casing of the XL follow-up and onward into the 'New' branch and the 2DS variants, the 3DS family of portables is a sizeable one and over the years we found ourselves falling for Nintendo's clever ploys and happily upgrading from trusty system to a slightly-better trusty system. Before we knew it, we'd become intimately acquainted with multiple 3DS consoles. Yep, Nintendo saw us coming a mile away.

Thinking back and counting on fingers, this writer has owned a grand total of... seven? Yes, technically, seven, although two of those came in an eBay bundle with games, one of which was gifted to a colleague. My OG Aqua got traded in when I upgraded to an XL, and I eventually gave that XL to a friend after I jumped again to a New 3DS with faceplates. Add in a New XL (the SNES one) and a 'backup' New XL I snapped up relatively recently, and we arrive at a totally normal and rational seven 3DSes for me. What?

A quick survey of the NL team reveals similar multiple-system stories. Alana had "one 2DS, one standard 3DS, and then an XL," while Jim had two standards before upgrading to a very tidy Poké Ball New 2DS XL. Across the entire team — including both the sensible people who only owned one or two consoles and the more, ahem, prolific amongst us — around three 3DSes seems to be the average number.

However, we do all work for a website called Nintendo Life; perhaps it's to be expected that we've got more systems to our names than someone who works for, say, Horse & Hound. We've got family members who have gone through multiple systems too, though, so 'oh, I absolutely positively need another one for work' can't be the only excuse people use.

We're curious to know what the average number of 3DSes owned is amongst Nintendo Life readers, so feel free to let us know in the poll below exactly how many consoles in the 2DS and 3DS family of systems you've owned since 2011, and then head to the comments to give us more details.

In total, how many 3DS / 2DS consoles have you owned since launch?
The Nintendo 3DS Family of Systems

Do you still own all your past 3DS consoles? Did you trade in each previous one to get the next? If so, how did you go about transferring your games? Is it the Special Editions that got you? Those gorgeous 2DS variants with the moulded cases? How many 3DSes is too many 3DSes?!?!

(Seven, Gavin. Seven 3DSes is a tad excessive.)