YouTuber Bought Every Single Wii U And 3DS eShop Game Before It Closes For Good

If you’re plan­ning on get­ting a cou­ple of Wii U and 3DS titles before the dig­i­tal store­fronts for both plat­forms are shut down on March 27th. How­ev­er, one YouTu­ber has decid­ed to pre­serve the two gen­er­a­tions of software–by pur­chas­ing every sin­gle title on both sys­tems. Jirard “The Com­ple­tion­ist” Khalil has bought every game for a grand total of $22,791 for the full collection.

It was $9,673 for 866 Wii U games and $13,118 for 1,547 3DS titles, with the file size of these col­lec­tions com­ing in at 1.2TB and 276GB respec­tive­ly. The gigan­tic haul includes DSi­Ware, Vir­tu­al Con­sole games, and dozens of DLCs. Khalil not­ed the entire process took him 328 days to com­plete, required 464 eShop cards, and was fund­ed by var­i­ous sponsors.

“When a dig­i­tal store­front shuts down or games get delist­ed, count­less titles run that risk of being lost for­ev­er,” Khalil said in his video break­down. “What would it take to save all those Nin­ten­do Wii U and 3DS games from being lost? Step one of many was to deter­mine nec­es­sary costs and stor­age. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, none of the com­pre­hen­sive lists online that we found includ­ed prices or even file sizes, so we spent three days com­pil­ing all that data into a big spread­sheet. Once we had all that infor­ma­tion, we were able to more eas­i­ly march for­ward with our noble cause of preservation.”

Khalil says he will now donate the Nin­ten­do col­lec­tion to the Video Game His­to­ry Foun­da­tion, a non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion that pre­serves the his­to­ry of video games. Nin­ten­do announced last year it would be shut­ting down the 3DS and Wii U eShops, although games pre­vi­ous­ly acquired through these store­fronts can still be downloaded.

The vast major­i­ty of 3DS and Wii U games are phys­i­cal, but both sys­tems do have a num­ber of dig­i­tal exclu­sives that’ll be lost on March 27th. For the Wii U this includes Dr. Lui­gi, Poké­mon Rum­ble U, and plen­ty more. Mean­while, the 3DS was home to a large library of 3D-enhanced clas­sic titles and dig­i­tal-only games. This includes the pop­u­lar Poké­mon games from the Game Boy an Game Boy Col­or era.