Nintendo DS Launch: How Touching Is Good Changed Handhelds

The Nintendo DS Launch: "Touching is Good" and the Day Nintendo Changed Handheld Gaming

There is, buried in the digital archaeology of YouTube, a television commercial for the Nintendo DS that aired in late 2004. A young woman sits on a park bench, both hands wrapped around the strange double-hinged device, thumbs working. A voiceover says, with absolute sincerity: "Touching is good."

People laughed at the time. It was an easy target. The DS — that "Developers' System," that "Dual Screen," that "Did Somebody Say" punchline — was, on paper, the most absurd handheld Nintendo had ever released. Two screens? A touchscreen? A microphone? What was this, a PDA?

And then it sold 154 million units.

The Handheld Nintendo Wasn't Supposed to Build

To understand the DS, you have to understand what Nintendo was afraid of in 2004. The Game Boy Advance had been a smash hit, but the wider handheld market was getting weird. Sony, fresh from the PlayStation 2, was making noises about entering the space. Nokia was putting Snake on every phone on earth. The dedicated handheld — the entire reason Nintendo had been the dominant force in portable gaming since 1989 — was starting to look like a category on borrowed time.

Nintendo's response, characteristically, was to do something nobody had asked for. The DS wasn't pitched as a Game Boy successor. It wasn't pitched as a PlayStation Portable killer. It was pitched as a third pillar — a device that sat alongside the Game Boy Advance in Nintendo's lineup, doing the things the GBA couldn't do, opening up games the GBA couldn't open.

The hardware reflected that. Two 3-inch screens stacked on top of each other. A resistive touchscreen on the bottom. A microphone below the lower screen. Wireless multiplayer that didn't need a cable. And underneath, more or less the same processor family as the GBA — a deliberate decision that made the entire Game Boy Advance library playable on the new system, slot-by-slot, day one.

It was, in retrospect, the most Nintendo thing Nintendo had done since the original Game Boy.

The Launch Lineup That Was Supposed to Flop

The DS launched in North America on 21 November 2004 with a famously underwhelming roster of launch titles. Super Mario 64 DS. WarioWare: Touched!. The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures. Mario Kart DS wouldn't arrive for another month. Nintendogs — the killer app that would, in retrospect, define the system — wasn't even on the Western release schedule yet.

And then people bought them anyway. Lots of them. The DS became the fastest-selling handheld in Nintendo's history, moving 500,000 units in the United States in its first week, and 1 million by the end of the first month. By the end of 2005, the DS had outsold the Game Boy Advance in the same time window, and the GBA was, essentially, retired.

The reason wasn't the launch games. The reason was the launch moment.

What the DS Actually Was

This is the part that gets lost in the retrospective. For most of 2004 and 2005, the DS was not, primarily, a games machine. It was a thing to play with.

The touchscreen was the entire pitch. People who had never picked up a video game controller in their lives could pick up a DS stylus and do something. They could draw in PictoChat. They could scribble notes. They could feed a virtual puppy, or pet a virtual cat, or compose music in a way that didn't require learning a piano keyboard. The DS lowered the barrier to entry for "doing something with a screen" to almost zero, and Nintendo — somewhat accidentally — discovered an enormous audience of people who had been waiting for exactly that.

The numbers tell the story. Nintendogs, when it finally launched in April 2005, sold 250,000 copies in Japan in its first week and 1.6 million in North America in its first month. Brain Age, which arrived in May 2005, sold 4.85 million copies in Japan in its first year and became a global phenomenon — middle-aged commuters on the Tokyo subway doing daily brain-training exercises on a handheld console, and feeling no irony about it.

The DS wasn't competing with the PSP. It was competing with crossword puzzles, newspapers, and the idle ten minutes you spend in a waiting room. And it was winning.

The Games That Made It a Console

By 2006, the DS was the best-selling handheld in the world, and it had done something the PSP never quite managed: it had built a software library that justified the hardware. New Super Mario Bros. in 2006 sold 25 million copies. Pokémon Diamond and Pearl in 2007 sold 17 million between them. Mario Kart DS sold nearly 24 million. The system had gone from a weird experiment to a genuine successor to the GBA in the space of two years.

And then, in 2008, Nintendo did something nobody saw coming. It released the DSi — a revision with two cameras, an SD card slot, and a built-in DSiWare shop. The DSi wasn't just a hardware refresh. It was Nintendo admitting, openly, that the DS had evolved from a games machine into something more general-purpose. The cameras were a toy. The shop was a forward-looking bet on digital distribution. The whole thing felt, even in 2008, like a dry run for what the 3DS would become.

The DS lineup was, by the time the 3DS launched in 2011, the deepest and weirdest software library Nintendo had ever assembled on a handheld. Elite Beat Agents. The World Ends with You. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Chrono Trigger DS. Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. Mario Party DS. The system that launched with a handful of safe ports had become a home for genuine creative risks, the kind Nintendo rarely took on its flagship consoles.

The Handheld That Ate the Living Room

There's a long-running debate in retro gaming circles about which Nintendo handheld was the most important: the Game Boy, the DS, or the Switch. Each of them was a hinge point. The Game Boy created the category. The 3DS extended it into 3D. The Switch hybridised it with the home console.

But the DS is the one that taught Nintendo a lesson the company is still living with. The lesson is this: a handheld doesn't have to be a games machine. It can be a screen that fits in your pocket, and what people do with that screen is up to them.

Every Nintendo handheld since the DS has carried that DNA. The 3DS added depth — literal, stereoscopic depth. The Switch added the ability to dock the screen. The Switch 2, whatever it turns out to be, will almost certainly be a DS descendant in some fundamental way, because Nintendo figured out in 2004 that the most interesting thing a handheld can be is the smallest computer you actually want to use.

Twenty Years Later, the Bricks Are Still Here

The DS has been discontinued for nearly a decade, and yet the second-hand market is more active than ever. The original "phat" DS in particular — the chunky, fat, wide-hinged model — is a collector's favourite now, both for its iconic industrial design and for the fact that it's the only Nintendo handheld with a Game Boy Advance slot built in. That machine plays the entire GBA library, plus the entire DS library, plus most of the Game Boy library through backwards-compatible slot-2 adapters.

You can hold one in your hand right now and feel the hinge. You can drop a GBA cartridge in the slot and watch the DS power up in GBA mode with the bottom screen showing nothing at all, like a Game Boy Color with a second screen stuck on top. You can pull the stylus out of the back and write a rude word in PictoChat, and your friend, in the next room, with another DS, can see it appear on their screen in real time.

Twenty years on, that's still a magic trick. Nintendo did it with a stylus and a microphone and two screens, and the rest of the industry is still trying to figure out what it means.

If you've still got a DS in a drawer, charge it. Find Mario Kart DS or New Super Mario Bros. or Nintendogs — anything, really. The hinge is still good. The battery still lasts. And twenty years later, "touching is good" still sounds less like a punchline and more like a prophecy.