(Tokyo) 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.
Posted at 7:35 a.m.
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 process of questioning itself 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 [la DS] thanks to the touch screen and the possibility of holding it horizontally, or vertically” like an open notebook, explains Hiroyuki Maeda, specialist in the history of the game.
The success is immediate with the public of “casual gamers” (casual players, general public) as evidenced by the most popular games: alongside more classic titles like the platform game New Super Mario Bros. or Mario Kartwe find Nintendogsoffering 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 then – pointed to the harmful effects of video games on the brain, one of the best sellers of the DS is the D’s Brain Training Programr Kawashimawhich attracts a senior audience to the console by offering to calculate the age of players’ brains.
“Whether a person is gifted or not [avec la console]it didn’t matter. They transformed into a game something that was not a game at the start,” underlines Mr. 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 smart phones” .
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