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Rise to Heaven: Five Years of Nintendo DS
The Nintendo DS Shocked the World, First by Succeeding, Then By Changing the Way Popular Games Are Made
Original by 1Up

----->Time was, a console reached five years old, it was expected to start thinking about retirement. It'd get a price drop, maybe a nice slim remodeling, and a handful of unforgettable triple-A games. Its successor would be announced at an E3 or a Tokyo Game Show, and then it would slowly start trickling out of the world of popular game design, and into the bright corners of nostalgia all great machines go. That axiom's never quite applied to handhelds. At least, that is, handhelds made by Nintendo. The Game Boy (including its three makeovers, the Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Light, and Game Boy Color) was on shelves for 12 years before its first real successor, the Game Boy Advance, launched. Nintendo sold 118 million Game Boys in those 12 years.

Nintendo's second handheld empire turns five years old this November. In half a decade, Nintendo has sold just under 108 million Nintendo DSes. Not only is it not ready to retire, the DS is on track to be the most popular devoted gaming machine in human history. Its popularity isn't undeserved. The DS hardware, a platform that was seen as too underpowered and eccentric to succeed before it was released, has fundamentally changed the way popular games are made. It has been the proving ground for the new design ideas driving the post-PlayStation zeitgeist, it redefined the concept of casual games, and remains one of the last havens for experimenting with traditional genres like RPGs and sidescrollers. It isn't hyperbole: the DS changed everything.

Rise to Heaven

----In February 2004, former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi said, "If the DS succeeds, we will rise to heaven, but if it fails we will sink to hell." For once, Yamauchi wasn't being dramatic. The first rumblings about the DS' existence came almost exactly one year before the system's North American launch. It was not a good day for Nintendo. By November 2003, Nintendo's glory days of crushing market domination were long over and, for the first time in over 100 years as a business, the company reported its first operating loss. The GameCube, just two years on from its release in November 2001, dropped to $99 in an attempt to lure people away from the increasingly popular Xbox and the nigh-unstoppable PlayStation 2. Many thought that the Game Boy Advance, being every bit as successful as its predecessor sales-wise, would guarantee Nintendo's continued health as a company, but keep in mind: their first bad fiscal year in history came in a period that saw not only the launch of the GBA SP, but also the launch of two new Pokémon games, the company's only true cash cow of the past eight years at that point. Nintendo was officially in trouble.

When Nintendo publicly announced the operating loss, they announced that they would be releasing a new console in 2004, though they didn't specify whether it would be portable or for the home. Naturally, the public balked. Nintendo had to be desperate. Sega's departure from the hardware market was fresh in everyone's mind at this point, and Nintendo's announcement recalled many of that company's failures. If the new system was a home console, would it suffer from being underpowered by the time Microsoft and Sony announced their new machines? If it was to be a third platform, how will they entice consumers? What if it was some kind of kitschy failure like the Virtual Boy?

The actual announcement of the Nintendo DS (which, word had it, stood for "Developer's System") didn't allay anyone's fears. A Nintendo-issued press release from January 2004 wasn't exactly illuminating. The only details were that the system would have two three-inch LCD displays. The press release described how following action on two screens would revolutionize gaming by offering multiple perspectives on the action. (Their example: in a soccer game, you would have an overview of the game on one screen and a close up of individual players on the other. Not exactly an idea to light the world on fire.) It didn't, however, explain how the new system would be significantly different from Nintendo's 25-year-old, dual-LCD-screened Game & Watch games. Even developers working on the DS at that point were in the dark about the system's specs. Matt Bozon of WayForward recalls, "I was designing Nitro (another of the DS' codenames) games prior to the public announcement, but I was still surprised. There wasn't anything in the documentation regarding a second screen or the touchscreen."

It wasn't until E3 2004 that the DS properly debuted. The original prototype was bulky and cheap-looking, even in comparison to the first commercial model, now fondly nicknamed the DS Phat. Two screens, vertically arranged, the bottom of which was a touch panel, alongside a microphone capable of unique voice recognition, ad-hoc wireless communication, Wi-Fi network play, and backwards compatibility with GBA software. It was a Frankenstein's monster of a system, a seemingly random mishmash of disparate technologies thrown together in a desperate bid to differentiate itself from Sony's imminent PSP.

What wasn't apparent at the time was that Nintendo was realigning its identity with the announcement of the DS. Before Reggie Fils-Aime showed the device to the E3 audience for the first time, he said, "We understand that we are not just going to make games for hardcore gamers. There are gamers who aren't as knowledgeable as you. Gamers who aren't your age. Gamers who don't have your tastes. [We are creating] new ways for you to relate to your games." It was hard to understand how this bizarre system was going to address new players. By the middle of 2005, though, it was pretty clear just what Fils-Aime was talking about.

Changing the Game

----The E3 2004 software for the DS was a motley collection of tech demos and rough launch games. The remake of Super Mario 64 and Metroid Prime Hunters demo impressed the traditional gaming press, but only served to make the system look underpowered in comparison to the PSP. There was nothing that really represented the paradigm shift Nintendo was selling the system as, except for a strange little Sega game directed by Takumi Yoshinaga called Feel the Magic. An entirely touchscreen controlled minigame collection, Feel the Magic was about a young dude trying to woo a young lady. It was playfully surreal and funny, including challenges like using the stylus to help flick goldfish out of a man's stomach. More than any other game, it was a harbinger of the light, casual, and often humorous approach to game design that defined DS software during its first year.

This playful approach to software solidified in Kiyoshi Mizuki's Nintendogs. Released in the spring of 2005, what was (at least conceptually) little more than an adorable update of the Tamagotchi-styled Japanese pet simulator, turned out to be the game that made all of the DS' disparate parts gel. Petting a virtual golden retriever with the touchscreen, getting it to respond to the name you'd given it by yelling into the microphone -- Nintendogs gave players something they hadn't seen before. The opposite side of the Nintendogs coin, of course, was Nintendo's quickly assembled Brain Age, a software adaptation of Professor Ryuta Kawashima's book Train Your Brain: 60 Days to a Better Brain. Released that same spring, Brain Age also utilized nearly all of the disparate functions of the Nintendo DS, but added up to a much different experience than the more joyful Nintendogs. Brain Age was a sober and minimal game, though still silly, thanks to the flippant polygonal avatar of Professor Kawashima.

Both games embodied Nintendo's slogan for the DS, "Touching is good!" and even launched their casual gaming label Touch Generations. They were both stripped of the input abstraction of A/B buttons and a D-pad as well as distant from the low-fantasy milieu (swords, sorcery, sci-fi, and war) of most videogames. These factors certainly helped Nintendo to capture and address that new audience they were describing at E3 2004. Nintendogs appealed to women in a way most popular games never did and Brain Age was a monumental success with players over the age of 50. But why Nintendogs and Brain Age were so massively successful is that they were emphatically goalless. Games were traditionally perceived as things that could be completed, "beaten". Even genres like puzzle games that were often endless were about challenging the player to constantly best themselves. Nintendo, meanwhile, was creating the 21st century's most successful new idea: the non-game. That term's something of a slur amongst hardcore gaming communities now, but it's the umbrella genre of game that has, in many ways, propelled videogames as an industry these past five years. Of course, as the DS played host to the casual renaissance, it has also kept classic gaming alive as no other system has.
Same as It Ever Was and Then Some

----The DS forced Nintendo to change their perceived corporate identity, sure, but it also forced them to finally modernize many of their franchises. Their third most successful game on the system, Mario Kart DS, marked the company's first awkward step into online gaming through Nintendo Wi-Fi. As much as they accomplished with forward steps like online, though, Nintendo achieved just as much by bringing almost entirely unchanged genres to the system. That New Super Mario Bros. is the second best selling game on the platform is indicative of how the most fundamental game types have found their footing on the system. For every piece of lifestyle software like My French Coach or Personal Trainer: Cooking, the DS has a new Castlevania or Dragon Quest. But where the Game Boy Advance was in many ways a platform for developers to revisit and refine the tropes of 8- and 16-bit game design, the DS has allowed game makers to experiment in ways they haven't elsewhere.

Maybe it would be more fair to say that Nintendo and other, third-party developers didn't have so much a new forum for old school design on the DS, as they have a new place to grow and evolve Japanese-style game design in particular. Adam Tierney, animator on Contra 4, thinks the hardware is responsible for not just revitalizing Japanese design but access to it, "The DS' unique control scheme celebrates the inventive, quirky design decisions Japan is known for. As a result, we're seeing more Japanese titles being localized here in the US than we might on more traditional systems. The DS has broken that barrier somewhat." That isn't to say that the DS hasn't seen its fair share of fine and distinctly Western games. First-person shooters like Dementium: The Ward and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, though not graphical powerhouses, have been very well received thanks to the touch interface on the DS. But the system was the only place with a significant audience where genres like the sidescrolling platformer and the Japanese RPG continued to evolve between 2004 and 2009.

"What Konami's done with the Castlevania games on DS has changed how people approach platformers," explains Tierney. "Sure, they're an evolution of Symphony of the Night, but Dawn of Sorrow especially was such a refinement of the puzzle platformer." Koji Igarashi's Castlevanias, up to last year's Order of Ecclesia, were larger, more aesthetically complex games than their GBA predecessors that wouldn't be commercially viable on different hardware. (Castlevania failed spectacularly on the PSP.)

The DS is a venue for these games to find an audience, where they don't on other platforms populated by similar game types. Even download services like Wii's Virtual Console, PSN, and Xbox Live Arcade often have to rely on nostalgia to drive sales of sidescrollers, and even then they tend to be re-releases of beloved classics. It's only recently that games of similar quality to Dawn of Sorrow and Contra 4, like Epic's Shadow Complex, have started to show up on platforms other than the DS with any frequency.

JRPGs, while stagnating on home consoles since the beginning of the decade, have also changed thanks to the DS hardware. Ever-stalwart Square Enix has continued to churn out Final Fantasy remakes for the system, but they've also created wild new takes on the genre like The World Ends With You. Co-developed by Jupiter, TWEWY would be physically impossible on another system, since the battle system literally crosses both screens and is entirely touch controlled on the bottom. It's a far cry from a staid turn-based role-playing game, yet those too are different thanks to DS. Even Dragon Quest, a series that has remained largely unchanged since its NES entries 20 years ago, has evolved because of the system. "Soon after we completed development of Dragon Quest VIII we began considering many different options, and by Spring of 2005 we had come to a decision [to be Dragon Quest to DS,]" says DQ creator Yuji Horii. "RPGs became less of a chore and playing in bits became very fun, so we incorporated many small quests in Dragon Quest IX that could be completed in an hour or so. On top of that, we included automatically generated dungeons that could be played even after clearing the game. This was a very experimental undertaking."


10 Years Gone

-----The DS has not just sold faster than the Game Boy of yore, but it's evolved faster too. The DS Phat model may have been a slight cosmetic improvement over the early prototype that debuted at E3 2004, but it was still clearly a beast. Heavy, ugly, and with dim, small screens, it was the equivalent of the original Game Boy in many ways, but it took seven years for the Game Boy Pocket to improve on the original. On the other hand, Nintendo released the DS Lite just 18 months after the DS launch. The Lite was more or less just a facelift for the DS; bigger, brighter screens, and a sleeker clamshell that more closely resembled Nintendo's Wii.

The DSi, the Game Boy Color-styled upgrade just released this past April, is a strange machine. It is, unlike the Lite, improved in function as well as form. It has significantly more RAM than the original DS and a faster processor, not to mention a camera, adding on to the feature set that seemed so strange just five years ago. Games not possible on the original hardware can be made on the new one. The question now is: will we still be playing DSes in another five years? "Initial DSi sales indicate that consumers are very supportive of the newest iteration and the growth potential is huge," says Majesco Vice President Gui Karyo. "That said, technology continues to evolve, so I suspect that we'll see new system introductions within five years and that will shape the DS life cycle."

Of course, alternative technology has already been introduced. The whole world of consumer electronics, even beyond gaming, has been altered by the DS' impact. Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch machines are transforming into formidable competitors to the DS, and they're doing so based on the same sorts of game concepts (small unending games, and simple touchscreen controls) that made Nintendo's machine what it is. Yuji Horii suspects that we certainly won't be playing the DSi a decade on from the DS' release: "Five years is a long time. I feel that the DS series will definitely be alive, but there will likely be an evolution in areas such as resolution."

Regardless of whether or not we're playing the Nintendo DS Advance in November 2014, the landscape will certainly be different. Nintendo has already created a new legacy with the two-screened wonder that outshines any past success, albeit a very different one. Where the Famicom/NES came to define the shape of game design, the Nintendo DS is the system that solidified videogames as a truly mainstream and populist form of entertainment. The system has brought everyone into the fold. It's preserved and nurtured gaming's oldest traditions and created wholly new ones. When the DS finally does retire, it will be remembered as possibly the greatest console made. But that's still a ways off, to say the least -- especially with a new DS model having been announced shortly after this article was first published. Not bad for five years' work.