The DS Didn’t Just Save Nintendo, It Predicted the Future of Gaming

Nintendo holds a huge place in gaming history, but there’s a roughly two decade window where they were simply on fire. In the Eighties, the NES and Game Boy resurrected the home gaming and handheld markets; in the Nineties, they waged a console war with Sega and won. But by the turn of the millennium, Nintendo had begun to lose steam, outsold by Sony’s PlayStation and approaching the 2000s with a bloodied nose.

The gap grew worse with the launch of PlayStation 2 in 2000, with Sony wriggling their way into households across the globe with an immense library including the Final Fantasy and Grand Theft Auto series, on top of its popularity as an affordable DVD player. Sony had cannibalized a market that Nintendo once owned.

Nintendo’s boon had been their handhelds, which outperformed their home consoles, but Sony’s upcoming PlayStation Portable (PSP), a gaming and media hub said to be as powerful as a PS2, had alarm bells ringing. Their next handheld, the DS, was an experimental clamshell console with dual screens and a touch pad, yet was tasked with somehow recovering the ground lost to Sony while also being a worthy successor to the Game Boy name. 

Despite all odds, Nintendo DS managed to not just be a success and fend off the competition, but went on to be the second-highest selling console of all-time (behind the PS2) with over 154 million units sold worldwide. But how did it do it? Rolling Stone spoke with industry veterans about how Nintendo’s forward thinking eye for innovation saved it from bowing out of the race for gaming domination.

Doom and gloom

First released in North America on Nov. 21, 2004, the Nintendo DS arrived at a time when the air around the company was thick with the looming threat of defeat. Both in games media and behind-the-scenes at development studios and publishers, there was an uneasiness at play. After back-to-back losses sustained with the home consoles Nintendo 64 (1996) and GameCube (2001), another lackluster launch could’ve spelled the end of Nintendo. Crystallizing the sentiment inside the company in 2003 was then-Chair of Board of Directors, Hiroshi Yamauchi, who claimed “If the DS succeeds, we will rise to heaven, but if it fails we will sink to hell.”

Keza MacDonald, games editor for The Guardian and author of the upcoming book Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun, sensed Nintendo’s crown slipping. “By 2004, Nintendo was in third place behind PlayStation and even behind Xbox in most territories, so something needed to change,” she tells Rolling Stone. “They could probably have released another conventional Game Boy and it would have sold okay, but it would not have broadened the gaming population the way that the DS and the Wii did.”

Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo from 2002 until his death in 2015, saw things similarly. “Games have come to a dead end,” he prophetically told Mainichi Interactive in 2004. “Creating complicated games with advanced graphics used to be the golden principle that led to success, but it is no longer working […] It’s obvious that there’s no future to gaming if we continue to run on this principle that wastes time and energy [in development]. Nintendo is called ‘conservative’ and ‘quiet’ nowadays, so we hope to show our existence as an innovator to new styles of entertainment.”

Their competitors were also looking to innovate, with Sony’s PSP catching the eye of video game voice actor and gaming YouTuber Jon Cartwright. “PSP was a multimedia machine before [there was] a smartphone,” Cartwright says. “So you could have an MP3 player or watch movies or play games or browse the internet all in one device, while also having visuals that we hadn’t seen in the handheld realm.” Sony was looking to repeat the PS2 trick, offering an all-encompassing media hub for the handheld market.

Meanwhile, Gene Park, reporter for The Washington Post, was initially deterred by Nintendo’s experimentation. “I think the dual screen formats confused me,” Park says. “At that point, I was getting frustrated with Nintendo because I wanted to play a regular video game with a regular controller, and here comes Nintendo with dual screens and a touch screen. That thing didn’t sound attractive to me at all.” Park wouldn’t have been alone, meaning baked into the very DNA of the DS the risk of alienating core fans. 

Goodbye Game Boy

Launching the DS meant Nintendo was pivoting from the most recognizable branding in all of gaming. There was a period in time where the term “Game Boy” became suburban parent slang for any gaming device, synonymous like “Coke” is for soda. “There still hasn’t been another Game Boy, one of the best selling pieces of consumer electronics of all time at that point,” says MacDonald. “I think it was really bold to abandon that naming, it was a huge gamble.”

However, Nintendo spokesperson at the time Perrin Kaplan confirmed they were also developing a successor to the Game Boy Advance, telling IGN, “you can never have too many Game Boys.” The DS’ backwards compatibility with the GBA threw some doubt on the validity of Kaplan’s statement, but for MacDonald, this felt less like a marketing ploy and more like a contingency, “I think they were keeping a successor to the Game Boy in the back pocket in case the DS completely flopped.”

While the DS would go on to be Nintendo’s most successful device of all time, its much-maligned initial design led to slow sales at first. “It looked so ugly,” MacDonald says. “It’s very Y2K and plasticky. It might be Nintendo’s least beautiful console and it didn’t fit in your pocket very easily.”

Helping to send the DS into the stratosphere was the 2006 DS Lite redesign, a sleeker refreshed model that, conversely, may just be Nintendo’s most beautiful console. Its round edges, perfectly rectangular form factor and range of vibrant colors made it a quantum leap in design from the original DS. “It had a more modern aesthetic and it was a fashion moment,” according to Cartwright. “They got some celebrities [such as Beyonce and Zach Braff] to model the DS and it felt trendy to have a DS Lite in a way that no other game console ever did.” 

The redesign is a microcosm of what Nintendo achieved overall during the 2000s era, making gaming a part of everyone’s lives. “It was a lifestyle device,” continues Cartwright. “If you’re on a train, you can just stop and shut it down and then play it again when you get home. The diversity and variety of how you can play your games was a big part of the DS’ appeal.”

One of the DS’ big innovations was its two screens, an idea that had been thrown around at Nintendo for a while but not quite executed on the level of the DS. “The dual screen aspect has always really been a weird little obsession of Nintendo’s,” MacDonald claims. “If you look back to connecting the Game Boy Advance up to the GameCube or Pac Man Vs. or some Game and Watch consoles that also had two screens, it was a big deal at Nintendo.” Game and Watch handhelds are particularly strong indicators of Nintendo’s dual screen obsession, with many of the devices looking almost identical.

The two screens served a dedicated function in the DS’ software, in some more impressive ways than others. “Another Code had some really clever puzzles in it where you had to angle the screens to reflect off each other, another where the solution to the puzzle was to close and open the DS, I was stuck with that for like, half a day,” adds MacDonald. “At first I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s so many possibilities for this,’ but there were eight and we saw all of them within the first couple of years of the DS.”

The DS also brought rapidly advancing touch screen technology to the west in a time before the iPhone, where accessible touch screens were limited to underwhelming devices like PalmPilots. “It was the most mind blowing thing about the DS,” states Cartwright. “It enabled a new realm of gameplay which landed so well with a casual audience.” 

“It was key to their success,” adds MacDonald. “What Nintendo discovered before the iPhone was that touch screens are really intuitive, and the people who struggle with buttons do really well on the touchscreen.” 

Wi-Fi wasn’t widespread in 2004 either, but the DS’ wireless connection abilities made an impact beyond gaming. “In our house at that time, we only had wired internet and it was the DS that made us get a wireless router,” says Cartwright. Taking advantage of that feature not only were a slew of multiplayer games, but one of the DS’ most beloved apps, a free software called Pictochat where users could ping text and drawings to DS owners nearby. “You turn the DS on, you have settings, and you’ve got Pictochat,” continues Cartwright. “Everybody gravitated towards it.”

“It’s the digital equivalent of passing notes in school,” says MacDonald. “It’s the same impulse as MSN Messenger; these little tokens of connection between people. Nintendo is quite good at these one shot fun ideas. PlayStation and Xbox were taking off with Call of Duty, and here’s Nintendo with a little note passing app.” 

It’s Mario Time

Nintendo’s big launch title for their new handheld was Super Mario 64 DS (2004), a remake of the Nintendo 64’s own day one flagship, Super Mario 64, and one of the most groundbreaking games of all time. Having a huge 3D platformer on the DS was a powerful statement from Nintendo, but the handheld’s design limitations forced Nintendo to change the original game significantly.

“Lacking an analog stick, Super Mario 64 DS was an incomplete 3D Mario game, so Miyamoto wanted to try to improve it,” developer Motoi Okamoto told Game Developer in 2017. “We added three extra stages and the ability to play as four characters: Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, and Wario. Yoshi could hover in the air, which helped to relax the difficulty of jumping around in the 3D world.” 

Okamoto also stressed the difficulties in production, “Miyamoto would come to us at 11 p.m., after he finished all of his board-member work, and say, ‘It’s Mario time.’ At that point, we’d start a planning meeting that would run until 2 AM […] It was the craziest crunch time that I’ve ever experienced in my development career. But if the God of Games was working so much, could we give up? Miyamoto had incredible stamina.”

Super Mario 64 DS was a play for Nintendo’s core fans, many of whom had soured on the brand over the course of the GameCube generation, which saw only a slow drip of quality games over the course of its life cycle. However, Cartwright believes the DS wouldn’t have been the success it was if Nintendo had continued to appeal to its fanbase. “I don’t know how far the core Nintendo base takes you,” he says. “You really have to go out of your way to get a different demographic buying these games. If they just rested on games like Mario 64 DS, I don’t think it would have done great. It’s a great game to have in the mix, but it’s in its own bubble.”

A huge success story for Nintendo during the DS generation was Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training (2005), an edutainment software title designed to help people stay sharp as they grow older. “I don’t think a single person on Earth predicted Brain Training doing so well,” says MacDonald, who stressed the degree to which it stood out from the gaming landscape. “I remember getting into a heated argument in the pub with someone about it being a game at all. I was like, ‘It has daily rewards, it has points and challenges, all the stuff,’ but looking back, who cares if it’s a game or not, it’s something people wanted.”

A wild swing at the time developed into a core tenant for Nintendo. “Without Brain Training, they probably wouldn’t have gone on to do like Ring Fit Adventure (2019), or Wii Fit (2007), or even [toy clock] Alarmo,” explains Cartwright. “Taking game elements and putting them into more of a lifestyle concept, that was pioneered with Brain Training.”

Brain Training, and the DS as a whole with its touch screen and later iterations’ downloadable apps, was a hint of what was to come in the world of smartphone gaming before the smartphone was even invented. “Brain Training is an ancestor to games like Wordle today,” says Park, highlighting the split between casual and hardcore audiences between phones and consoles. “Nintendo seemed to have dropped a lot of that focus, and a lot of video games have, but I think it’s because the mobile market has taken over that space, whereas no one’s still doing a Zelda phone game.” 

Brain Training was a rising tide which lifted the boats of other Nintendo titles, such as Animal Crossing: Wild World (2005). In a 2006 interview with Wired, the game’s producer, Katsuya Eguchi would credit the Dr. Kawashima-inspired game specifically, “People are buying the DS to play Brain Age, and we’re getting the benefits of having some of those people. And they see Animal Crossing and know that’s a game that has a low hurdle to entry. You don’t have to know much about games to pick up Animal Crossing and play it. That’s true from kids to grandparents.”

Key to expanding the gaming population, Wild World was infused with ideas that would help it take off around the globe. Along with the removal of region-specific holidays like Christmas and Halloween, Wild World fully utilized the DS’ Wi-Fi capabilities. “One of the things I find really amusing, myself, is the turnip market, where players talk about what price the turnips are selling in their village, and how they’ll beg friends to open up their village when the prices are high. The whole idea of players running around finding the best prices is really funny to me,” Eguchi told IGN in 2006, referencing a now beloved feature of the Animal Crossing franchise. 

Wild World also succeeded at appealing to a female market which, at the time, was almost entirely untapped. “I don’t think I can over emphasize how absolutely shit the games industry was at involving women in any way,” MacDonald highlights. “There was carte blanche to be incredibly sexist in your advertising, so for Nintendo to come out with Animal Crossing, and for it to show that a lot of people who play games are women, was so important.” Women ended up comprising 44 percent of DS owners worldwide.

For Park, Animal Crossing is a microcosm of a bigger achievement of the DS — bridging hardcore and casual markets. “It’s like a live service MMO (massively multiplayer online game) where you check in a bit every day,” he says. “Nintendo was catching on to how well habit forming games work on the mobile format. Then there’s cozy gaming and the rise of engagement gaming too.” This connection extends to handhelds in general. “You 1732034129 have the Steam Deck which is a more accessible version of a PC,” Park adds. “It’s a bridge between hardcore PC people and people who are wary of PC gaming. The DS is a huge link between the Game Boy towards the future of gaming.”

The Future of (Nintendo) Gaming

Reinvention was core to Satoru Iwata’s philosophy as Nintendo’s president. In an interview with Stephen Totilo in 2004, he said, “We have some final destiny in entertainment, and that is whatever gorgeous or wonderful thing we may be able to come up with, in the future, people are going to get tired of it.”

The Nintendo DS made gaming a core part of more people’s lives by completely changing the way we played them. With 150 million units sold, the DS strategy stands as one of the most ingenious in gaming history. As Nintendo gears up for their next generation, could that strategy work again? “I think the world’s changed too much since the DS came out, this perfect moment for it to exist,” MacDonald ponders. “Replicating it wouldn’t work anymore. It laid the foundations for smartphone gaming and reinforced what Nintendo was doing at the time, which was trying to expand the gaming population. That’s not needed now.”

“I think there’s room for casual titles, but not as the focus,” Cartwright adds. “Breath of the Wild was a runaway launch title for the Switch because it showed how versatile it was and that it could run this big console game. There’s definitely success stories in the casual realm like Ring Fit and Mario Party, but I don’t think it can drive their hardware because they’ve kind of lost that casual prominence.”

Park believes that the work Nintendo did in the 2000s to convert casuals into gamers is a strong enough foundation to build the future on, “What Nintendo is releasing is that they don’t need to create all these wacky little genres to play in the mainstream space because Super Mario and Pokémon are now for the casual market.” 

The DS undoubtedly took Nintendo to new heights, but its true legacy was the ability to successfully harness the power of a casual audience. Yet, despite the litany of ways the device was ahead of its trend and prescient of future trends, it’s unlikely that another DS could exist in today’s market. Or is it?

Park believes the future holds a pantheon of casual gaming options that could be true successors to the DS, rather than dwindling into the realm of smartphones. “Sooner or later,” he says, “there’s going to be no generations on this planet that have never touched a video game before. Give it a couple of decades, we might see a much more diverse casual gaming world.”