What was PictoChat?

PictoChat came built into the Nintendo DS. It was not an app you downloaded and not a service you signed up for. It was already there in the system menu, from the moment you switched the handheld on.

It had no internet connection. PictoChat ran over local wireless, so it only reached people sitting near you. Someone across the room appeared. Someone across town did not exist.

How it worked

There were four rooms, labeled A, B, C and D. You picked one and joined it, along with up to fifteen other people who had picked the same one. There were no usernames to invent and no accounts to make. You arrived under whatever name the handheld already knew you by.

Every message was a drawing. You wrote with the stylus directly on the lower screen, in your own handwriting, and a small keyboard sat underneath for anyone who preferred to type; typed letters landed on the same canvas. Most people did both at once. A sentence with a face drawn beside it was the ordinary way to talk.

What it felt like

I got a Nintendo DS for my eleventh birthday. I set it up the way you did, with your name and your birthday, and opened PictoChat because it was right there on the menu. It wished me a happy birthday, with a little tune of its own.

My brother got one too. He joined the room, and we sat in the same house sending drawings back and forth, screen to screen. To an eleven-year-old it felt like the peak of technology. Two people and a room was the whole thing, and it was enough.

Nothing was saved. Messages scrolled away as new ones arrived, and when you left, the room forgot you. There was no history to scroll back through, no profile to maintain, and no number next to anybody's name.

Because proximity was the only thing gating entry, rooms formed wherever people were already gathered. School buses, waiting rooms, the back seat of a car, conventions, queues. You did not go online to talk to your friends. You noticed your friends were a few desks away, and a room appeared.

That is the feeling I keep coming back to: it knew who you were, it put a friend or a sibling a screen away, and it did not want anything from you for it. Nintendo never took it onto the internet; fans have built browser remakes of it since, which says something about how much the room was missed. PixoChat is, in part, an attempt to take that room to your phone, with your friends in it.

Why you cannot use it now

PictoChat shipped with the DS, the DS Lite and the DSi. It was not carried forward to the hardware that followed, and it was never released for phones. It cannot be installed anywhere else, because it was a part of a handheld rather than a product of its own.

That is usually what people are looking for when they search for it now. Not the software exactly. The shape of it.