It may not generate as much nostalgia for me as my Yellow Game Boy Color, but the Nintendo DS is the console that got me hooked on these little machines and video games.

Perhaps it was because I was just the right age (12 years old) when it hit the market, but you can’t imagine the hours I’ve spent capturing pocket monsters, jumping from platform to platform, or especially, taking care of my virtual village. Without it, I wouldn’t be the Nintendo geek I am today.

And it didn’t just change me, it also changed the video game industry forever. It introduced dual screens, touch controls… and invited the gamer world to all kinds of casual players who until then hadn’t touched a gaming device (Does anyone remember grandparents playing Brain Training?).

It is, in short, the perfect candidate to continue this journey through gadgets, objects, series, movies, and albums from another time that is Retrovision.

From potato to a design object

I don’t know what you think, but both the Nintendo DS Lite and the DSi are two of the most beautiful consoles ever made. Quite striking if we consider the clunky original DS, a kind of Frankenstein that looked like a GBA SP on steroids.

With such a minimalist and pure appearance more than a “kids’” video game console, it seems like a design object that could appear in art books alongside the works of Jony Ive for Apple. It even seems more suited to the shelves of Muji than to a video game store or a big box retailer.

Fun above all

If there’s something that characterizes Nintendo, it’s that while the rest focus on graphics, they concentrate on creating new ways to play and making their games fun. And as evidence, just press a button.

In 2004, while Sony was trying to create a portable version of the PS2, Nintendo pulled a much less capable console out of its hat that had two screens, and what’s more, one of them was touch-sensitive. At first glance, the battle was lost, but in the end, creativity and fun won over brute force.

I won’t deny it. The Nintendo DS catalog has a lot of filler and weird stuff (that’s what happens when you sell 154.02 million consoles), but also many gems: We’re talking about a console with New Super Mario Bros. or Pokémon Black and White, pinnacle games in their respective series. There are also games like Animal Crossing: Wild World that laid the foundations for the great success the series enjoys today.

The most interesting and different DS games weren’t played with buttons, but with the stylus and touch screen. Nintendogs and, especially, Brain Training were viral games, in an era when that word didn’t even exist, and brought all sorts of people into the gamer universe. Along with other titles, they laid the foundations for mobile gaming. There were so many possibilities that games like Brain Training, Hotel Dusk, or Guitar Hero (accessory included) invented the concept of playing with the DS held like a book.

Better with friends

The Nintendo DS and the PSP were the first portable consoles with WiFi, although back then we didn’t quite understand what it was, and it was used more for playing local multiplayer games than for surfing the internet. You no longer needed a cable to trade Pokémons.

The good thing about that era is that every kid had a Nintendo DS. So, when you went to the park or were on a bus trip, there was always someone to battle, play a match, or race with.

A highly underrated feature, perhaps because everyone ended up with more or less legal copies of the most well-known games, was DS Download Play. Thanks to this feature, if one of your friends had Mario Kart and the rest didn’t, you could download (temporarily) part of the game and race each other.

Nowadays, there’s no console that does this, partly because games have gone from taking up 8 megabytes to several gigabytes and because almost all multiplayer games are either online (like Fortnite) or designed for home consoles. On the Switch, you can share the joy-cons with a friend but not the game itself.

As often happens after great successes, the end of the Nintendo DS was not pretty and left a taste too bitter for what it had been. Piracy, as easy as buying a cartridge, killed many studios’ interest. Smartphones quickly overtook and captured casual gamers… and the Nintendo 3DS, its successor, arrived late and with a very tumultuous launch.

Though, as they say, let’s not forget the fun we had.