Gamer’s Unopened Nintendo 3DS Case Crumbles to Dust

Oh man, so here’s the deal. This gamer dude — or maybe a gal, who knows, details are fuzzy, right? Anyway, they find this untouched, shiny Nintendo 3DS case. It was like sealed in the box, no joke. Then BAM! They open it up and it’s, like, a mini dust storm. I swear it’s the kind of thing you see and just go, “Huh?!”

Nintendo gear, right? Usually, it’s built like a tank. You slap a case on your 3DS thinking, cool, it’ll handle when you drop it or toss it across the room (unintentionally, of course). Plus, you get to snazzy it up without messing with the OG look. But this tale turned out different, and suddenly, it feels like a lot of folks are probably scratching their heads and eyeballing their 3DS cases with suspicion.

So, this person, Randolph Co or something — I read it somewhere, maybe NintendoSoup? — had this Dragon Quest 8 case for the 3DS. Still sealed! And to their utter horror, as if seeing the thing crumble before their very eyes, the case had disintegrated into a pile of sad crumbs in its box. The pic shows the packaging looking fine, snug as a bug, but inside? It’s like, poof! All gone. Once vibrant slimes — blue, green, brown — now just a colorful memory.

What’s up with this case, right? No official word from the owner or anything, but common sense (or a lucky Google search) tells us TPU, that thermoplastic whatchamacallit, is the culprit. It’s eco-friendly, they say, biodegrades in three to five years. This particular case? Made in 2015 — so yeah, it’s overdue on its farewell tour. Funny how we think “biodegradable” is awesome until it eats up our collectibles.

Biodegradable is cool, until it munches away your mementos. Which is just ironic, you know? Some suit probably figured folks wouldn’t use these 3DS cases longer than a couple of years. Or maybe they figured we’d be so rough with ’em, they’d need a toss in the recycle bin anyway. Anyway — oh wait, where was I? Right, so maybe there are more of these cases out there ready to poof. Just make sure your Nintendo treasures are safe, who knows, they might be vanishing as we speak.

In the grand scheme of things, as much as we love hearing tales of Switch games surviving fires — because that’s a thing now — sometimes it’s the littler heartbreaks that hit home. Can’t shake the feeling that our 3DS cases might just turn to fairy dust while we’re not paying attention. Just, I dunno, check on yours, will ya?