Nintendo 3DS Ambassador programme

Nintendo has today announced a global change in the trade pricing policy of Nintendo 3DS. In Europe, this will be applicable from August 12th.

There have been times in the past when we, Nintendo, have marked down the trade prices for our video game machines a certain amount of time after launch to further accelerate adoption of the hardware, but never in Nintendo’s history have we dropped a system’s trade price so significantly less than 6 months after launch.

We are aware this may cause you, the loyal fans who supported Nintendo 3DS from the beginning, to lose trust in us, and this is not our intention in any way.

All of you who have kindly supported Nintendo 3DS from the beginning are Nintendo’s most important customers. Although we may not be able to completely prevent you from regretting purchasing Nintendo 3DS early, we would like to express our gratitude to our special customers like you by offering 20 free downloadable games from Nintendo eShop.

These free games are available to anyone who owns a Nintendo 3DS system and uses a wireless broadband Internet signal to connect to the Nintendo eShop at least once before 23:59 pm (Central European Time) on August 11th. These Nintendo 3DS systems will be automatically registered in the Nintendo 3DS Ambassador programme. For information and a tutorial video on how to connect your Nintendo 3DS to the Internet, please visit the Nintendo 3DS website here.

UPDATE: Please note that the Nintendo 3DS Ambassador Programme is not related to the Wii Connection Ambassador intiative, already running in Europe. To register for the Nintendo 3DS Ambassador Programme, you only need to make sure you visit the Nintendo eShop at least once on your Nintendo 3DS before 23:59 pm (Central European Time) on August 11th.

The programme contains two elements:

1.Beginning Sept. 1st, Nintendo 3DS Ambassadors will be able to download 10 NES™ Virtual Console™ games at no charge and before they are available in Nintendo eShop for the general public. These games, including Super Mario Bros.™, Donkey Kong Jr.™, Balloon Fight™, Ice Climber™ and The Legend of Zelda™, will be released as paid downloadable games, but Ambassadors can download them in advance of launch for free. Once the paid versions of the games are released in Nintendo eShop later in the year, the updated versions will be available to Ambassadors for download at no cost.

2. By the end of 2011, Nintendo will provide Ambassadors with 10 Game Boy Advance Virtual Console games. These include games like Yoshi’s Island™: Super Mario™ Advance 3, Mario Kart™: Super Circuit, Metroid™ Fusion, WarioWare™, Inc.: Minigame Mania and Mario vs. Donkey Kong™. These games will be available exclusively to Ambassadors, and Nintendo currently has no plans to make these 10 games available to the general public on Nintendo 3DS in the future.

More details about this programme will be announced in the future.