In 2022, it may be a little easy to ignore Nintendo’s gimmicky impulses. The company long ago stopped trying to compete on important fronts like graphics power or providing competent online services. While Nintendo was the industry leader for years, it has spent the past two decades creating great games for the weakest hardware on the market.
You would expect Nintendo to focus on amplifying those shortcomings. Instead, it releases cardboard playsets. It pulls a collection of its beloved 3D Mario games from both the physical and digital markets just months after it was first released. It announces the inevitable end of support for Splatoon 3 before the game is even out. It’s a strange and quirky company, and it shows in its decisions, both in its games and its business.
After the DS, the Wii, the Wii U, and the Switch each had unique gimmicks, it’s easy to want the business to just be normal. Right now, if a Switch game lets me use motion controls, that’s a Switch game I’m done with. When you consider the way every other company operates, Nintendo’s decisions are more than a little frustrating.
But 18 years ago, that fatigue hadn’t started yet. I was really impressed when Reggie Fils-Aime introduced the DS at E3 in 2004. Even though I was only ten at the time, I grew up playing my sister’s big brick original Game Boy and the Game Boy Pocket I got at five for Christmas. The first portable games I played were in black and white. While there were some good ones, like Pokemon Blue and Super Mario Land 2:6 Golden Coins, I also spent a lot of time with underpowered licensed sidescrollers trying to translate valuable console games into technically inferior hardware.
So the DS seemed to come from the future. Its chrome-gray clamshell, which looked like it could sneak through the night sky as well as playing games, only added to that thrill. The ability to produce N64-quality 3D graphics on a handheld the size of a thin paperback book amazed me. Super Mario Land 2 would have been fun, but Super Mario 64 DS offered me a full 3D world to run around in. A year earlier, I was struggling to illuminate my almond-shaped Game Boy Advance with passing street lamps. Not only did the DS have a backlit screen, but the games I could now play in the backseat of my parents’ minivan felt ages beyond anything my experience had taught me a handheld should be able to run.
But before I got my hands on it, I had to wrestle with the design of the thing. As someone who can’t imagine how much dexterity it takes a pianist to have his left and right hands play completely different things at the same time, the DS amazed me. How would I watch two screens at once? How do I play games on two screens at the same time? I didn’t understand how it could possibly work, but I was immediately intrigued.
And I haven’t even mentioned the features of the DS yet. The DS was released years before the first iPhone came out, so the now so simple idea of being able to control a game by touching a screen was mind-boggling. While the game itself wasn’t much more than a tech demo, Pac-Pix, in which you draw your own Pac-Man and let him chew on ghosts, was the wildest thing I’d seen in my gaming life at that point.
But Nintendogs was the real killer app of the time. It used the stylus, but it also used the DS’s microphone so you could talk to your dog. I didn’t know the release date, so I kept going back to Walmart, hoping that the Dachshund and Friends version was waiting for me behind the glass. In the end it was there, and although I got tired of the game one day, it was a thorough presentation of everything the console could do, allowing you to pet your dog with the stylus, talk to him through the mic and interact with him. play around the world. both screens.
When the DS appeared, it promised an instant jump into the future. While the Switch that makes console-quality games more portable and the Steam Deck that makes every PC game playable on the go are cool leaps forward, nothing will ever surpass the sheer amount of innovation Nintendo put into one handheld with two screens in 2004.
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