Nintendo DS

The Nintendo DS was born from the vision of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who sought to disrupt the handheld gaming market rather than merely iterating on the Game Boy formula. Iwata, who had assumed the presidency in 2002, believed that competing solely on hardware specifications was a losing strategy and that Nintendo needed to expand the gaming audience through innovative interfaces. The DS project, internally codenamed "Nitro," embodied this philosophy by building the entire hardware concept around a novel interaction method rather than around processor benchmarks.

The decision to use dual screens drew from Nintendo's long history with multi-screen concepts. The original Game & Watch Multi Screen series (1982-1989), created by Gunpei Yokoi, had used two screens in a clamshell form factor. Iwata and his team recognized that a touch-sensitive lower screen paired with a conventional upper display could create an entirely new category of gameplay. The resistive touchscreen technology chosen was deliberately low-tech compared to the emerging capacitive touchscreens used in PDAs, but it offered the advantage of working with a stylus for precise input and did not require bare skin contact, making it usable with gloves.

Shigeru Miyamoto was notably skeptical of the dual-screen concept during early development. Miyamoto reportedly questioned whether two screens were necessary and whether the added complexity would confuse consumers. However, as prototype software demonstrated the interface's potential, Miyamoto became an enthusiastic supporter, eventually designing Nintendogs as one of the system's showcase applications and contributing significantly to the DS's software strategy.

The DS hardware used two ARM processors: an ARM946E-S running at 67 MHz as the main CPU and an ARM7TDMI running at 33 MHz as a co-processor for audio, Wi-Fi, touchscreen input, and backward compatibility with Game Boy Advance cartridges. The system featured 4 MB of main RAM and 656 KB of VRAM, with 3D graphics hardware capable of rendering up to 120,000 polygons per second with hardware transformation and lighting. The 3D capabilities, while modest compared to home consoles, were unprecedented in a handheld and enabled ports of PlayStation and N64 titles.

Iwata's marketing strategy for the DS was carefully crafted to manage expectations. Rather than positioning the DS as the Game Boy's successor, Nintendo initially described it as a "third pillar" alongside the Game Boy Advance and GameCube. This hedging allowed Nintendo to retreat to the established Game Boy brand if the dual-screen concept failed commercially. In practice, the DS rapidly cannibalized Game Boy Advance sales and clearly became the successor platform, but the "third pillar" messaging reduced the perceived risk for both consumers and investors during the launch period.

The DS Lite redesign, spearheaded by Nintendo's design team under Kenichi Nishi, was inspired by Apple's design aesthetics and the growing consumer electronics trend toward sleek, minimalist hardware. The DS Lite reduced the original's 275-gram weight to 218 grams, slimmed the profile dramatically, and most importantly upgraded the screens with significantly brighter backlights. The redesign was a commercial masterstroke; the DS Lite launched at the same price as the original DS and immediately became one of the fastest-selling consumer electronics devices in history, with sustained shortages in Japan and North America throughout 2006. The DS Lite's success validated Iwata's strategy of expanding the gaming audience and laid the philosophical groundwork for the Wii, which launched later in 2006 with a similarly accessible approach to gaming interfaces.