Is twenty years enough to become retro? The Nintendo DS, a portable console released in 2004, is celebrating its anniversary this Thursday. It foreshadowed smartphones with its touchscreen functions, and, with the Wii, reached a very large audience which broadened the horizons of video games.
With its clamshell format, its double screen and its stylus, equipped with a microphone, the machine, launched on November 21, 2004 in the United States and several months later in Europe, stood out in the video game landscape of the time. . It contrasts in particular with the various Gameboys, another Nintendo creation which popularized gaming on portable consoles.
Twenty years of very mainstream games
While the Japanese firm was in the midst of a reconsideration phase in the face of disappointing sales at the turn of the new millennium, the DS responded to a very specific objective set by the boss at the time, Satoru Iwata: “Increase the population of players” . “Even people who had never touched a console could easily understand (the DS) thanks to the touch screen and the possibility of holding it horizontally, or vertically” like an open notebook, explains Hiroyuki Maeda, specialist in history of the game.
The success is immediate with the public of casual gamers, general public as evidenced by the most popular games: alongside more classic titles like the platform game New Super Mario Bros. or Mario Kart DSwe find Nintendogsoffering to interact with a dog via the stylus and microphone, or the Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training Programwhich even attracts an audience of seniors.
The DS will be sold in total 154 million copies worldwide, making it the second best-selling console in the history of video games, just behind Sony’s PlayStation 2. Launched in 2008, a variant, the Nintendo DSi, will add two cameras and the possibility of downloading applications: for Hiroyuki Maeda the console thus “served as a link between the Gameboy and current smartphones”.
