Wow, time sure does fly doesn’t it? Yep, as the title suggests, it’s been three whole years since the Nintendo Switch came out, along with the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild.

And well, what a set of years it’s been. In the Nintendo Switch games department alone we’ve had one of the best Zelda games of all time, an absolute masterpiece of a 3D Mario platformer (Super Mario Odyssey), sequels to beloved franchises like Splatoon (Splatoon 2) and Luigi’s Mansion (Luigi’s Mansion 3) as well as perhaps the great Super Smash Bros title ever made (Super Smash Bros Ultimate).

Caption: This still brings shivers down our spine, even now

That’s already an insane lineup on Nintendo’s part, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. For year after year, the Switch has been flooded with amazing game releases. It’s sold more units worldwide that any Nintendo home console system bar the NES and Wii. It’s seen Pokemon move to the home console market with two distinct games, and blow sales predictions clean out of the water.

Plus it’s clearly proven the dark days of the Wii U were just a blip on the radar too. Everything the Wii U got wrong has been fixed with its successor, and almost every game rereleased on the Switch has sold significantly more than its Wii U counterpart to boot.

Caption: Especially Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. That game’s sold 23 million copies so far, compared to the 8 million its original version sold.

But let’s not end at the official stuff. No, not only has the success of the Switch itself been staggering, but so has that of the fandoms and communities built around its games too.

For instance, since 2017, the Breath of the Wild speedrunning community has been blown wide open time and time again. Items and Korok seeds have been duplicated through a wide array of interesting glitches. New ways to warp to inaccessible areas have been found, with wrong warping tricks letting you massively sequence break the game or escape Hyrule’s own borders.

Caption: In just three years, the BoTW speedrunning community found a way to one shot the final boss

And the game has seen a lithany of insane bugs found in general too, many of which completely wreck the world’s own laws of physics. Like the Lizalfos Curse, which can cause NPCs to walk around upside down or objects to fall through the floor. Or the infamous moon jump glitch, which is about as crazy as it sounds.

Mods have been a huge surge in popularity too. Indeed, in the three years since the Switch launched, titles like Breath of the Wild have seen a flood of mods released too, with the more ambitious ones promising to add huge new features to the game or redesign the entire game world. That’s crazy, and once again shows how fast everything progresses with the internet as it is now.

Caption: This incredible Bob-omb Battlefield remake was made and released only a year after Super Mario Odyssey itself first launched.

So kudos to Nintendo for making the Nintendo Switch, and its great games, as well as to the fans for all their fan works and speedrunning communities. It’s been a crazy three years so far, and we can’t wait to see what’s next!