Decades before we got married and started a family, my partner and I connected over a little Boxer puppy named Charlie. We would throw him a ball, scrub him when he got dirty, and take him for walks every day. It was a bonding experience, mediated entirely through the touch screen of the original Nintendo DS. The touch experience turned an otherwise simple game as nintendogs, where the objective is to take care of virtual pets, in something that will create a deep emotional connection. And years before smartphones were in everyone's pocket, it helped show a generation of gamers what's possible with a touchscreen.
Now, we mostly take it for granted, but before the arrival of the first DS in 2004, the idea of a touchscreen was, for many people (myself included), the stuff of science fiction. The screens I was used to (TVs, computer monitors, MP3 players) were definitely No for touching And commercial devices like Apple's Newton, with its handwriting technology, were financially out of reach.
But the DS was something different. As the successor to the Game Boy, it was more of a toy than a piece of cutting-edge technology. It took the basics of a traditional gaming handheld and doubled the screens, stacking two screens on top of each other and placing a hinge in the middle so they could be folded like a book. The most important part was the bottom screen, which could respond to touch with your fingertip or the included stylus.
The DS's strange design made it accessible. Despite the touch screen, it was fair quite familiar thanks to a variety of physical controls, and it had two cartridge slots so you could still carry your old Game Boy Advance carts. One look and it was clear that this gray shell-shaped brick was intended for gaming. But it was also quite strange.
In typical Nintendo fashion, the company not only introduced a new control method, but also went ahead and showed off its possibilities. Some of the best-selling DS games are those that wouldn't have been possible without that touch screen. nintendogs wowed players with how natural it felt to rub your little pup's head with a finger or play ball by virtually tossing a Frisbee while doing your best to care for a small group of dogs. Meanwhile, the Brain age The series, a collection of puzzles designed to exercise your mind, showed how intuitive handwriting recognition can be for games like sudoku. Hell, Brain age had millions of people doing math problems for fun. The company also introduced touch elements in its major franchises, so you could fight in a new way in The legend of Zelda or access even stranger mini-games in WarioWare.
Even better, because the DS was a huge success (the Switch may be a huge success, but the original DS is still Nintendo's best-selling hardware), many other developers jumped on board as well. The early days of the handheld were full of creativity. Here is a sample:
- Trauma CenterAn anime drama about performing surgery by swiping and slicing on the touch screen, while your finger essentially becomes a scalpel.
- Professor Laytona series of detective-themed logic puzzle books, where pencil replaces pencil
- electroplanktonA musical toy where you manipulate nature, such as bouncing tadpoles off leaves or spinning strange circular fish, to create beautiful sounds.
- Scrawlwhere you can solve puzzles by typing “anything” and the game interprets your letter
- Etrian Odysseya dungeon crawling/mapping simulator where you draw your own map, which takes up the entire bottom screen
- elite agents (and its Japanese counterpart, Osu!), where the touch screen becomes a guitar hero-Style musical instrument that forces you to follow the rhythm.
- Mom cookingwhere you can chop, slice and serve meals completely by touch
The Nintendo DS made the concept of touch screens easier for people because it was also basically a Game Boy. All of these touch games sat alongside titles that barely used touch or ignored it entirely, like Koji Igarashi's excellent one. castlevania running or role playing games like Dragon Search and final fantasy. This allowed Nintendo to slowly introduce the idea of interacting with a screen using touch to millions of people, long before the idea became an integral part of modern life. And you can draw a pretty straight line from its release to the golden days of early iPhone games like Roland, tiny wings, Super Brothers: Sword and Sorceryand world of goowho were equally full of invention and joy. In fact, several successful DS titles, such as Mom cooking and scrawlThey finally reached the cell phone. The transition was almost perfect. Even Nintendo ended up manufacturing a mobile phone Super Mario game you play by tapping.
Two decades later, a touchscreen is supposed to be part of almost any gaming device. It's become so widespread that it would be strange if modern hardware like the Switch or PlayStation Portal No have touch screens. What was previously novel to me has since become the norm; When I handed an old DS to my oldest daughter, she wasn't surprised or surprised to be able to pet a virtual puppy. It's what I was used to. But that also made her the ideal person to adopt Charlie, who has been waiting inside that cartridge for the past 20 years.
