Nintendo DS
Touching is good
Nintendo's dual-screen handheld combined touchscreen input with traditional controls, enabling innovative gameplay that dominated handheld gaming.
The Nintendo DS seemed gimmicky at announcement: two screens, one touch-sensitive, with a microphone. In practice, the design enabled entirely new gameplay possibilities. Nintendogs used touch and voice; Brain Age made touchscreen input natural; traditional games used the second screen for maps and inventory. The DS became one of the best-selling gaming devices ever.
Fast facts
- Manufacturer: Nintendo.
- Screens: two 3-inch displays, bottom touchscreen.
- CPU: ARM9 (67MHz) + ARM7 (33MHz).
- Input: touchscreen (stylus, or a thumb nub on the wrist strap), microphone, Wi-Fi.
- Size: 5.85 × 3.33 × 1.13 inches — “about the size of two GBA SPs side by side”.
- Sales: 154+ million units.
- Variants: DS Lite, DSi, DSi XL.
It did not look gimmicky for long
The reception is worth pinning to a date. Reviewing the hardware in February 2005, Hyper had already stopped treating the feature list as a novelty:
there is no other format available that offers a touch-screen, built in microphone (making voice command possible), two screens and built in wireless communication
Its doubt was about software, not silicon — “we probably won’t be seeing anything within the first year of release that will take full advantage of these features”.
The two-screen idea was doing work before any game shipped, too. The DS booted “near instantaneous[ly]” into a menu with “a clock and calendar on the top screen, and play options/settings on the bottom screen, giving you quick touch screen access to any DS or GBA games in the slots”.
Design philosophy
Why two screens worked:
- Information display: map, stats, inventory on one screen.
- Touch interaction: direct manipulation of game elements.
- Asymmetric play: different views for different purposes.
- Backwards compatibility: played GBA games.
Defining games
DS software showcases:
- Nintendogs: virtual pet with touch and voice.
- Brain Age: touchscreen brain training.
- Professor Layton: puzzle adventures.
- The World Ends with You: dual-screen combat.