After Nintendo made a few announcements on Thursday—smartphone game details, theme park attractions—the company went on a Splatoon information spree ahead of that Wii U game's May 29 launch. It's an unusual multiplayer-focused entry from the typically couch-friendly Nintendo; while Splatoon contains limited single-player training and local two-player modes, the primary game is found in the online, four-on-four game. This level of online focus is a first in a title from the big N.

Before retail launch, the public will get a chance this weekend to sample Splatoon's online action via a free, limited demo. At first, we thought this could be an interface or stress test—the kind we've seen from online series like Titanfall and Battlefield—but after peeking at the fine print, we began to wonder just how much Nintendo might learn. That's because the Splatoon demo will only run for three nonconsecutive one-hour chunks this weekend.

That limited test, as opposed to the weekend-long or even week-long tests we've seen from shooter betas, would make us nervous even if the developer in question had tons of online-multiplayer experience, let alone someone with as shaky a reputation as Nintendo. This is a company that has routinely said "no" to enabling online multiplayer modes in action franchises people have been dying for—the New Super Mario Bros. series, in particular—and its track record for the games it has hosted online sessions of isn't much better.

We're curious as to how Splatoon will ultimately perform as an online game, but in the meantime, we're taking this moment to recall highlights of the company's shots at online matchmaking up until this point.

Mario Kart DS: Get ready to feel old: This year will mark the tenth anniversary of Nintendo's first online multiplayer game. MKDS debuted in November of 2005 simultaneously with the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service—which originally required users to find access points with lowly WEP security if they wanted to play original Nintendo DS games online. Thankfully, Nintendo removed that weird hardware roadblock from the Wii and all future systems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YpzGAVvzRQ

Unsurprisingly, MKDS was a pretty barebones affair, limited to four participants per online race and reducing the track count to 20, down from the offline game's 32. A few of the weapons, including the crucial "shield" items of triple shells and triple bananas, were also nixed online.

Perhaps worst than any of those was the game's notorious "friend code" system, one that haunted Nintendo's online games for years. In the case of MKDS, having your friends' information loaded into your Nintendo DS still wasn't sufficient enough to efficiently connect each other to online games. Players didn't get a handy "friends list" when getting into a game. Instead, you and your desired playmates had to search for an online session at the same time—presumably after calling or instant-messaging each other to coordinate.

(Note: This, and any other Nintendo DS or Wii game that employed the old Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection as its matchmaking service, no longer works online. Nintendo nixed that functionality in the middle of 2014.)

Metroid Prime Hunters: Nintendo's last major online gun-combat game—not to mention the only online-multiplayer version of the Metroid Prime series—landed in 2006. Its attempts to marry touch-screen precision to a first-person shooter was commendable at the time, even though it ultimately led to some of the worst cramped-hand issues we've ever experienced on the Nintendo DS (and for a system with a lot of weird touch-and-button combination games, that's saying something).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc90BKReJWo

Just like MKDS, Hunters limited online play to four-player battles, but at least it added a "friends and rivals" menu option so that players could better coordinate sessions with known entities. It also gave players a much-desired option to stick a player into a "rivals" list after a battle, should players want something that resembled a rematch. For whatever reason, this game didn't suffer from noticeable online lag at the time of its release, even though it offered some speedier movement options by way of rolling up into a "morph ball" and rolling away as an escape. That might have been a benefit of the online mode's incredibly tiny arenas and low player counts; either way, it made us hopeful for online Nintendo gaming to come.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl: The Wii continued the DS' tradition of using friend codes, sadly, but that didn't stop a lot of friends from swapping digits and squaring off in Smash Bros.' first online battle modes in early 2008. Once numbers were swapped, getting into a battle with friends was as easy as creating a "room" in the game's "friends" online mode; conversely, getting into a free-for-all with strangers was easy enough, though the fighting game put a lot of limits on players at that point, particularly the inability to pick from "time" and "stock" battles and make other customization choices. (Players also didn't have the ability to chat freely with anybody on their friend list, and the game went so far as to not include any identifying information when playing against randomly matchmade opponents.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp4X5DGqLM8

Brawl suffered greatly from the online community's ability to grief and disconnect without facing any penalties. Thankfully, the makers of the Wii U and 3DS follow-up games made sure to institute temporary bans and other penalties to police such shenanigans.

Ultimately, though, Brawl's online mode will probably be best remembered for brutal lag, especially in four-player matches with random matchmaking. Later in 2008, Capcom would go on to include the GGPO protocol in its Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 release of Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix. That protocol's predictive powers and other lag-hiding trickery revolutionized the world of online fighting games, but from the feel of Super Smash Bros. on Wii U and 3DS, Nintendo still hasn't quite caught up; those modern games also suffer from significant lag, depending on opponents.

Mario Kart Wii: A phenomenal game in its own right, MKW also opened the series' online racing floodgates to giant races worthy of the series' name—at least, for a little while.

https://youtu.be/wdGkVii8XHk?t=448

In the game's online mode, every track could be raced, every item could be used, and up to 12 racers could compete at the same time—all on Nintendo's free online service, no less. Heck, the game even supported two friends playing on the same Wii in online modes. However, what Nintendo didn't plan for was hacks affecting online racing, bolstered by how easy it had been to load custom files by way of an SD card and tricks like the Twilight Princess hack. Soon enough, the online modes were overrun with griefers and exploiters, and Nintendo had built zero infrastructure to penalize or ban bad apples—let alone patch out the vulnerabilities.

Animal Crossing: City Folk: The first Animal Crossing installment on Wii contained similar friend-code roadblocks as its DS forebear from 2006, meaning players couldn't trade or interact with other Internet users unless they made an effort to swap contact info—presumably a move on Nintendo's part to keep towns from being inundated with questionable or vulgar messages from strangers. We wish either of these games, or even the newer 3DS version, had at least included a "no talk, just trade" option so as to help packrats more easily find or trade the game's rarer objects.

What the 2008 Wii version did include was Nintendo's first major voice-chat peripheral, the Wii Speak Microphone. This odd accessory was designed to be stuck to a TV, as opposed to worn as a microphone, so that a full room of players and watchers could talk to another connected Wii user. Thanks to a series of noise-cancellation mics, this peripheral actually did a bang-up job delivering online voice chat through TV speakers without either party needing to adjust any settings. Weirdly, even though the Nintendo DS has an internal microphone, Nintendo didn't enable it for online voice chat within a multiplayer game until the launch of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon a few months earlier that year.

What Nintendo has learned over the years

Nintendo's shift away from the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and toward the modern Nintendo Network included a few key changes, including the end of "friend codes" on the Wii U and, perhaps more importantly, infrastructure on both the Wii U and 3DS to better enable regular patches. The latest Super Smash Bros. game has already received a few updates since its launch last fall with tweaks and "nerfs" for its characters, while Mario Kart 8 has, quite frankly, gotten much better with a $12 DLC package that added 16 quality racetracks and six new racers to the game, plus a zippy and fun 200cc mode.

Still, in terms of sheer network performance, Nintendo doesn't have a mighty reputation; as stated earlier, the latest Smash Bros. online modes still live and die based on your opponents' connections, and they don't allow higher-bandwidth players to hit a switch that might block HPB foes from slowing the action down. Wii games like Mario Strikers Charged and Excitebots: Trick Racing had their fair share of lag woes, as well.

Plus, Nintendo has never maintained an online shooting game with as many as eight combatants at one time—especially one like Splatoon in which the game must constantly exchange player data like location, movement, health, item use, and ridiculous amounts of paint splatter. In fact, the game maker only has two "online versus-mode shooters" under its belt: Metroid Prime Hunters and Star Fox Command. Neither of those supported voice chat, by the way, and neither will this month's Splatoon; as the game's director told EDGE Magazine, "When I played online games, I didn't like the negativity I got and people telling me, 'You’re crap. Go away.'"

We have enjoyed the heck out of Splatoon at press events over the past year—and we think its "control a battlefield with paint" mechanic will be a breath of fresh online-shooting air—but those demos benefited from Nintendo hard-wiring its Wii U units together (ain't no way they'd try running a wireless signal at a show like E3). Our bigger question, as the game nears launch, is whether Nintendo will struggle to connect rabid Splatoon fans together without issues like lengthy queues or frequent disconnects. Before the game launches on May 29, we'll only have three one-hour windows this weekend to peek at that answer.