Featured Image Credit: The Pokémon Company
Nintendo 3DS owners have been blessed with a new Pokémon game to play in 2026, as if this year wasn’t wild enough already.
The Nintendo 3DS launched all the way back in 2011 and saw several revisions and upgrades over the years.
Now it’s been entirely replaced with the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, because why have a console for home-use and a console for travelling when you could instead have a console that does both?
Due to this, support for the Nintendo 3DS has officially ended, and yet here we are talking about a new Pokémon game you can currently grab for the system, with a slight catch of course.
Modding and emulating has been all the rage this year with several decompilations dropping on PC, which can then be taken and transformed into PC ports for games never meant for that platform.
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As this craze has progressed, modders have realised that portable game consoles like the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation Vita and now the Nintendo 3DS are excellent platforms for these distributed classics, which is how Pokémon Snap is now playable on the 3DS.
Pokémon Snap released on the Nintendo 64 in 1999, later receiving a sequel on the Nintendo Switch in 2021.
Instead of catching, training and battling Pokémon, you’re instead tasked with taking pictures of them. You travel throughout several different habitats and can either bait or antagonise Pokémon to make them behave in various ways. Some Pokémon will evolve when certain conditions are met, and others will have unique interactions with each other making for excellent photo opportunities.
The game was never re-released for the Nintendo 3DS but it’s been remade by Manuel Rodríguez Matesanz using Unity, and is now available as a free download. The Nintendo 2DS is also supported.
Okay, the first beta is almost ready. It just have the first course and still needs a lot of polish but 😏 #unity #madewithunity #gamedev #nintendo3ds #pokemonsnap3ds #nintendo64 pic.twitter.com/CCET0vwQgc
— Manuel Rodríguez Matesanz (@ManuDev95) May 7, 2026
Those who don’t own either of those consoles can emulate it with the relevant software. Be warned though, you’ll need your own dump of the game for this and simply downloading a copy for the internet is piracy, so avoid that.
We should also warn you that the current build of Pokémon Snap on the 3DS isn’t content-complete, but in time, the full version will be available.
At the time of writing, 12 Pokémon can be photographed in both the tutorial and beach levels, with the other levels presumably being added as time goes on.
Despite not being a finished project it’s still really impressive, and arguably something both Nintendo and The Pokémon Company should have tried to do themselves.
Pokémon Snap is all about taking photos and the Nintendo 3DS had a camera on it. A version of the game that lets you turn around and take pictures as if you’re actually in the game world would have been fantastic, though it’s understandable why the companies would want to stick to the traditional Pokémon games instead.
If you’d like to play the original Pokémon Snap officially on modern hardware, it’s available on the Nintendo Switch/Nintendo Switch 2 via Nintendo Switch Online.
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