Video game: the Nintendo DS portable console, a hit with a wider audience, celebrates its 20th anniversary

It has won over a new audience of non-gamers and foreshadowed gaming on smartphones with its touch screen: the Nintendo DS portable console, the greatest commercial success of the Japanese video game giant, celebrates its 20th anniversary on Thursday.

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 at the time in the video game landscape.

While Nintendo was in the midst of a reconsideration phase in the face of disappointing sales, the DS responded to a very specific objective set by the boss at the time, Satoru Iwata: “to 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, history specialist of the game.

The success was immediate with the public of “casual gamers” (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”, we find “Nintendogs”, offering to interact with a dog via the stylus and microphone.

And while at the time a popular theory in Japan – criticized by the scientific community since – pointed out the harmful effects of video games on the brain, one of the best sellers of the DS is the “Program of Dr. Kawashima’s brain training”, which attracts a senior audience to the console by offering to calculate the age of players’ brains.

“Whether a person was good or not (with the console), it didn’t matter. They turned something into a game that wasn’t a game to begin with,” said Maeda.

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, 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 Game Boy”, Nintendo’s portable console released in 1989, “and current smartphones”.

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