We’re Still Living In The World The Nintendo DS Built, 20 Years Later

If there’s one thing you can always count on Nintendo to do, it’s whatever you least expect. After all, what other developer would release an exercise game with a Pilates ring as a controller, sell a build-it-yourself cardboard toy, or drop an important update on its next console on the night of a presidential election? But before all that, Nintendo made maybe its boldest move, releasing a handheld console unlike anything else on the market, and its success set the stage for the company as we know it today.

The Nintendo DS launched in Japan on December 2, 2004, and even its release date is an anomaly. A Japanese company, Nintendo had typically released its consoles domestically first, then later brought them overseas. The company changed that for the DS, releasing the handheld a full 10 days earlier in North America than in Japan. By putting the DS up for sale before Black Friday in the U.S., Nintendo ensured that sales would be as high as possible for the launch. It was right about that, but more importantly, releasing the DS outside of Japan first showed that the company was pushing an expansion of its audience, and that push paid off.

By the time the DS launched in Japan, it had 2 million preorders — double the number that Nintendo had expected — and by the end of the year, it had sold nearly 3 million units worldwide. To this day, the DS remains the second best-selling console of all time, coming in just a few million units short of the PlayStation 2.

The phenomenal success of the DS was no fluke. Both the handheld and the Nintendo Wii, which launched two years later, were part of what former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata called the “Gaming Population Expansion” strategy. At a time when gaming was still seen as a niche hobby, and marketed almost exclusively to young men, Nintendo wanted everyone to be able to “experience and enjoy video game entertainment, regardless of their age, gender, language, cultural background or gaming experience.”

Of course, any company would be happy to expand its customer base, but Nintendo took the mission to heart. It aggressively marketed the DS with an extremely 2000s slate of celebrities like Zach Braff and Paris Hilton, while using the handheld to test both games and hardware features that no other company would even dream of.

The most obvious of those are the signature dual screens. The console’s clamshell design mimicked the flip phones that were popular at the time and enabled some genuine innovation on the part of developers. Plenty of games, like the DS Castlevania titles, used the second screen as an always-open menu, while games like Henry Hatsworth and Bowser’s Inside Story use it as an essential part of gameplay. That’s also made porting DS games into a tricky endeavor, as remakes of The World Ends With You and Another Code have struggled to capture the magic of the original. One of the DS’ screens is even a touchscreen. Arriving years before the iPhone made touchscreens a standard cell phone feature, the DS made its touchscreen essential.

Software for the DS was even more pointedly intended to expand players’ ideas of what a game console could be. The DS was Wi-Fi enabled — a first for Nintendo — which turned the console into an ad hoc communication device. Included with every DS was PictoChat, which let up to 16 people chat over a local network with text and drawings. While it didn’t turn the DS into an alternative to cell phones or chat rooms, it was still a novel idea that showed how developers could create novel social experiences for players who happened to find themselves near one another.

Maybe the best example of how the DS broke the traditional gaming mold is Brain Age. Made in consultation with neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima, Brain Age is intended to improve players’ brain function through puzzles, as a way to appeal to more casual gamers. While the research on its effectiveness is inconclusive, Brain Age was a massive hit. Nintendo would officially launch a strategy to promote players’ health through games a decade after the DS’ launch, but Brain Age can be seen as laying the groundwork early for games like Wii Fit and Ring Fit Adventure, which would turn from training players’ brains to training their bodies.

Coming after the underperforming GameCube, the DS showed that not only was Nintendo still at the top of its game, but that it wasn’t going to play it safe. Nintendo’s experiments with the DS paid off immediately and also set the stage for the wild swings it would take in years to come. By actively working to expand the gaming audience, the DS gained plenty of new fans for Nintendo — and more importantly, it showed people who might have never had an interest in gaming that there was something there for them, too.