Splatoon 3 fans are making up their own minigames to pass the queue time

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Fans are recreating one of the best features from Splatoon 1

Splatoon 3
(Image credit: Nintendo)

Splatoon 3 fans are making their own minigames to play when the queue times start getting too long, and it turns out there's a lot you can do when you're stuck in the lobby for minutes at a time.

The very best of these was recorded by YouTuber Failboat, who managed to play Pong alongside fellow content creators Fyrus and hackerling. All you need is to paint a wall, hold down the super jump button, and slowly slide your way up and down in the style of the paddles in the Atari classic. Just make sure whoever's playing the ball can hit the angles convincingly.

This is, of course, all fake - there's no actual collision between squids, so it's just players convincingly recreating the shots to pass the time. If the thought of a small object slowly bouncing around a flat surface has you thinking about the heady days of DVD menu screensavers, you're not the only one, as YouTuber Motovation can attest.

While your typical Turf War lobbies don't take to fill up in Splatoon 3, matchmaking for ranked Anarchy Battles is another story, and those waits have been the primary motivator for these artisanal minigames.

While fans are making their own fun in Splatoon 3 libraries, Nintendo already had this all figured out back in the original Splatoon. The Wii U game had an array of minigames in classic arcade style you could play while waiting for a match to start. While those diversions are gone in modern Splatoon, their spirit clearly lives on.

Splatoon 3 players are also finding wonderful and occasionally upsetting things to do with their customized lockers.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.