You had to be there.

Almost a decade ago, on a dead-man-walking console, no one was expecting the most fun shooter of modern times. That it was created by a developer who not only hadn’t ever cracked the shooter code, but didn’t really seem interested in doing so? Preposterous. It’s easy to forget now just how unlikely Splatoon was – not in terms of success, but in simply being any good at all.

Hell, getting anyone to even try this odd software was an ask. Even among good friends, I had a hell of a time trying to get anyone to take the plunge with me in buying a Nintendo shooter…with squids and water guns…and no voice chat. At the time, no one in my friend group cared to play a communal game without voice chat, and it certainly reeked of Nintendo-ness to release a “modern” shooter without a feature that Treyarch had successfully cracked on the freakin’ Wii years earlier. To be honest, I didn’t want to buy Splatoon, either. Why reward Nintendo for being so utterly out of touch?

I gave it a shot, anyway. And I was hooked.

It’s rare in gaming to play something truly new. Being the first in my group to play Splatoon felt like I was the first to walk on the moon. The view from this new reality was spectacular. A shooter without any of the frustrations we’ve come to associate with shooters? Short 3-minute bursts of utter, madcap fun? Balanced weapons that put “mature” bro shooters to shame? A visual style and tunes that were actually cool? The more I played, the more I could feel the shift in my brain. I began to understand what Nintendo was going for, and it was glorious.

Not that anyone else really wanted to play it. It was 2015, the year of Battlefield: Hardline, Call Of Duty: Black Ops 3, Star Wars Battlefront, Halo 5: Guardians, and Evolve. Playing the cartoon squid game – without voice chat! – was not high on the must-play list for anyone I gamed with. COD was already on the platform. Why drop $60 on this oddball game, on an oddball platform, which would require setting up conference calls just to hang? All in the name of…using a paint roller to sit through a pretty bad map rotation system?

Back in the TNE days, when message boards were a thing, writing a long, considered take could change people’s minds. Another forum member named SJMartin had also enjoyed the game (alas, I never got a chance to really game with him), but responses to him were in the “good for you, but hard pass for me”-vein. How could I get people to join me? I wrote up a long post, detailing just how deep the strategy was, about how the game could almost be played as a pacifist, about how genuinely amazing the weapons’ balance was. Re-reading it, I knew it wasn’t enough. It didn’t communicate what Splatoon felt like.

“It’s like getting a handjob from a rainbow.”

There. Done.

Crass, but it got the point across. A few friends jumped on board. Then a few more. And then everyone in the group was playing. Sometimes being patient zero is fun.

Now it’s all lost to time. The Wii U and 3DS servers went dark a week ago. For an already-forgotten footnote of a console, I understand, but I thought we’d have a little more time to put together some vintage gaming nights with Monster Hunter 3: Ultimate, or some DWI nights for NFS:MWU.

But most of all, I’m sad that we’ll never get the original Splatoon back. Yes, we have its successors, but the second and third games took an experimental design and focused it. One can’t play newer installments with a real pacifist streak; the developers have slowly refined map design and weapons’ balance for a more combat-centric approach. It’s still fun, and still enjoyable. Becoming more competitive, though, has made the series more conventional.

Splatoon was better when it was less competitive. It was better when it was weird.

You had to be there.