Decades before we got married and started a family, my partner and I connected over a little Boxer pup named Charlie. We tossed a ball around, scrubbed him down when he got dirty, and took him for daily walks. It was a bonding experience — mediated entirely through the original Nintendo DS’s touchscreen. The tactile experience turned an otherwise simple game like Nintendogs, where the goal is to take care of virtual pets, into something that created a deep emotional connection. And years before smartphones were in everyone’s pockets, it helped show a generation of gamers just what’s possible with a touchscreen.
Now, we mostly take them for granted, but prior to the arrival of the first DS in 2004, the idea of a touchscreen was, for many people (myself included), something out of science fiction. The screens I was used to being around — televisions, computer monitors, MP3 players — definitely were not for touching. And commercial devices like Apple’s Newton, with its handwriting tech, 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 high-end tech. It took the basics of a traditional gaming handheld and doubled the screens, stacking two displays on top of each other and sticking a hinge in the middle so that you could fold it shut like a book. The most important part was the bottom screen, which could respond to touch via a fingertip or the included stylus.
The oddball design of the DS made it approachable. Despite the touchscreen, it was just familiar enough thanks to an array of physical controls, and it had two cartridge slots so you could still bring along your old Game Boy Advance carts. One look and it was clear this gray, clamshell brick was meant for gaming. But it was also pretty freakin’ weird.
In typical Nintendo fashion, the company didn’t just introduce a new control method — it also went ahead and showed you its possibilities. Some of the bestselling DS games are ones that wouldn’t have been possible without that touchscreen. Nintendogs captivated players because of how natural it felt to rub your little pup’s head with a finger or play catch by virtually flinging a frisbee as you did your best to take care of a small group of dogs. Meanwhile, the Brain Age series — a collection of puzzles designed to work out your mind — showed how intuitive handwriting recognition could be for games like sudoku. Hell, Brain Age had millions of people doing math problems for fun. The company also snuck touch elements into its biggest franchises, so you could fight in a new way in The Legend of Zelda or tap through even more bizarre minigames in WarioWare.
Even better, because the DS was such a hit — the Switch may be a massive success, but the original DS remains Nintendo’s bestselling piece of hardware — plenty of other developers jumped in as well. The early days of the handheld were bursting with creativity. Here’s a sampling:
- Trauma Center, an anime drama about doing surgery via swiping and slicing on the touchscreen, as your finger essentially becomes a scalpel
- Professor Layton, a detective-themed series of logic puzzle books, where the stylus subs in for a pencil
- Electroplankton, a musical toy where you manipulate nature — like bouncing tadpoles off of leaves or spinning strange circular fish — to create beautiful sounds
- Scribblenauts, where you can solve puzzles by writing “anything” and the game interprets your handwriting
- Etrian Odyssey, a dungeon crawler / cartography sim where you draw your own map, which takes up the entire bottom screen
- Elite Beat Agents (and its Japanese counterpart, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan), where the touchscreen becomes a Guitar Hero-style musical instrument, forcing you to tap along to the beat
- Cooking Mama, where you chop, slice, and plate meals entirely via touch
The Nintendo DS eased people into the concept of touchscreens because it was also basically a Game Boy. All these touch-friendly games sat alongside titles that barely used touch or ignored it altogether, like Koji Igarashi’s excellent Castlevania run, or role-playing games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. This allowed Nintendo to slowly introduce the idea of interacting with a screen via 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 launch to the golden days of early iPhone games like Rolando, Tiny Wings, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery, and World of Goo, which were similarly full of invention and playfulness. In fact, several hit DS titles, like Cooking Mama and Scribblenauts, eventually made their way to mobile. The transition was almost seamless. Even Nintendo eventually made a mobile Super Mario game you play by tapping.
Two decades later, a touchscreen is an assumed part of almost any gaming device. It’s become so pervasive that it would be weird if modern hardware like the Switch or PlayStation Portal didn’t have touchscreens. What was once novel to me has since become the norm; when I passed down an old DS to my oldest kid, she wasn’t shocked or amazed that she could pet a virtual pup. It’s what she was used to. But that also made her the ideal person to adopt Charlie, who has been waiting inside of that cartridge for the last 20 years.