Within hours of tearing open a brand-new Nintendo 2DS XL in front of his parents and grandma, reddit user Line_R had dragged the handheld gaming system’s clunky browser — intended for users to “search a website for game hints or catch up with email or news” — straight to the depths of Pornhub.
“Of course, one of the first things I did was to see if I could get porn on it,” the 18-year-old tells MEL. “It took some time to figure out Pornhub’s mobile lite version, but once I got there, I was surprised at how well it worked.”
That night, the 2DS XL came in handy. Line_R was at his grandma’s, and unable to sleep, he figured watching some porn might help. But he realized too late that his phone was almost dead, and he’d forgotten a charger at home. The situation was dire. And then he remembered the “trusty new Nintendo 2DS” next to his bed.
“It ended up being one hell of a great night,” he says. “My grandma was already asleep, so I didn’t have the trouble of having someone bust in, and I even had my speakers on like a madman. I could even wind down afterward by playing some games on it!”
Ever since that fateful Christmas night, Line_R’s used his Nintendo 2DS XL as his go-to “emergency situation” porn browser.
According to Pornhub’s 2019 Year in Review traffic report, Line_R is an anomaly. “Traffic from the 3DS dropped 42 percent, from 0.7 percent share in 2018 to 0.3 percent in 2019,” a Pornhub representative tells MEL. “That’s the proportion of console traffic, not all traffic, so it’s a very small number of people.”
But it hasn’t always been that way. Guys like Line_R were once a pioneering group of young pornography explorers venturing into the unknown. Between 2013 and 2014, Pornhub’s traffic from the Nintendo 3DS grew by nearly 12 percent — growth that parallels the more powerful New Nintendo 3DS being released.
With a browser that could easily reach Pornhub and a stereoscopic 3-D display, the potential to stream 3-D porn was too hard to resist. Take Eugene, a 21-year-old who just recently upgraded to perusing porn on a VR headset after spending years loading porn onto the 3DS.
In short, stereoscopic 3-D is when the picture is split in two and overlapped at different depths. “It tricks your brain into filling in the depth, thus creating the 3-D effect,” Eugene tells me. Eventually, he says, sites like Pornhub began providing the option to watch a video in 3-D. “You just had to find videos that offer a stereoscopic layout, click that and it’d merge the two pictures into one for 3-D.”
So just how legit was 3-D porn on the Nintendo 3DS? According to redditor Lewdares, who’s “watched a bit of porn on the 3DS,” the 3-D was exciting at first, but it mostly ended up being a fun novelty.
“In three-dimensional games like Super Mario 3D Land, the platforms that are the closest to the camera would seem like if they were closest to the player, and that gives you the depth to traverse 3-D scenarios more clearly,” he says. “Of course, in porn, this just translated to boob jiggling, like, it’s kind of there, but not really.”
Novelty or not, there was an audience hankering for more 3-D porn — and Texas pornographer Steve Awesome (his stage name) saw an opportunity. “At launch, there was nothing available as far as adult content for the [Nintendo 3DS], so I figured there would eventually be some consenting adults out there who might be interested in using their 3DS for more than just games,” he tells MEL.
After reading some articles on how to convert his existing side-by-side 3-D videos to be playable on the Nintendo 3DS, Awesome uploaded his entire library to a website, “Nintendo 3DS Porn Photos & Video,” where he encouraged users to “view my 3-D fuck films on your Nintendo 3DS in their full three-dimensional video glory.”
However, as 3-D-compliant devices became more accessible, bigger adult film houses began shooting 3-D videos of their own and offering them to stream on Pornhub. Awesome was ahead of the game, but the once-fertile land of 3-D porn and its thirsty, albeit “super-niche” audience was getting eaten up by Big Porn.
Just got myself a nice N3DSXL, so how do I watch 3D porn on this thing? from 3DS
“3-D consumer video has always had an uphill battle in being embraced by the masses,” he says. “The 3DS has been a fun and inexpensive way to enjoy a little bit of that magic ahead of time. In the same way that Avatar made 3-D a player again, I’m betting that mainstream cinema will be the first to introduce that new mystery format. Once we get past that, I’ll be sure to be shooting porn in that format, pronto.”
Despite it all, Line_R remains loyal to his Nintendo porn. For him, it’s not about the novelty of 3-D that drew others to the Nintendo 3DS. Line_R argues that the masses are missing out on the gaming device’s double-screen layout. You get video controls on the bottom screen and the ability to slow down or speed things up. “Once you find your way to Pornhub’s mobile lite version, you’ll find it works. And it works well,” he says. He sent me a picture of the layout, with the “tab still open from my last emergency session, lol.”
For Line_R, the user-friendly layout makes it perfect for emergency situations, like being at your grandma’s without a phone charger. As another redditor put it on the 3DS subreddit in 2018, “The ergonomic wedge shape makes it perfect for holding while absolutely beating the fuck out of your dick.”
Quinn Myers
Quinn Myers is a staff writer at MEL. He reports on internet culture, technology, health, masculinity and the communities that flourish within.
