When did Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection shut down?

Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection launched on November 14, 2005, Nintendo's first real online service: free online play for the Nintendo DS and later the Wii, against the industry tide of subscriptions. For Pokémon it was transformative. Across its life, 93 Nintendo DS games carried the service's blue logo, and the Generation IV and V games built their second lives on it, the Global Trade Station, Wi-Fi battles and voice chat in the Wi-Fi Club, Mystery Gift distributions, the Dream World and the Global Link.

The service was never entirely Nintendo's to keep. Its multiplayer backbone was run by GameSpy, a third-party host, and when GameSpy's new owners wound the business down, Nintendo announced the end: on May 20, 2014, Wi-Fi Connection shut down for every DS and Wii game at once. The shops survived a while longer; the playing did not.

For the DS era of Pokémon, that date is the era's true end. The GTS shelves emptied, online battles and the Battle Recorder's shared videos stopped, Mystery Gift's archives became unreachable, and Pokémon still asleep in the Dream World had until that same day to be woken and brought home. Local wireless, being nobody's server, was untouched, which is why two DS systems in one room can still trade, battle and explore the Underground today.

The community refused the ending in its own way. Fan-run replacement servers, Wiimmfi the best known, rebuilt the service's protocols, and DS games pointed at them with a custom DNS address connect again, GTS included. The official globe stopped in 2014. The unofficial one, remarkably, still turns.