Hardware · 2004–2013
A two-screened handheld with a resistive touch panel that Nintendo positioned as an experiment rather than a Game Boy successor — and which became the best-selling handheld console ever made.
Nintendo launched the DS in November 2004 and shipped 154.02 million units over its lifetime, making it the best-selling handheld console in history and, for a long period, the second best-selling games system of any kind behind the PlayStation 2. The hedging around its launch is easy to forget now. Nintendo explicitly described the DS as a third pillar alongside the Game Boy Advance and the GameCube rather than a replacement for either, which was a way of announcing a risky product without staking the handheld business on it. The risk was real: two screens, one of them a resistive touch panel operated with a stylus, plus a microphone, at a moment when Sony was entering the handheld market with the PlayStation Portable — a machine with better raw specifications, a media-playback story, and none of the DS's oddities. The DS won that contest decisively, and it did so by selling to people who were not buying handhelds. Nintendogs, Brain Age and the Professor Layton and Nintendo DS Lite era pulled in an audience with no prior console habit, and the touch interface was the mechanism — a stylus on a screen requires no instruction, where a two-stick controller requires a great deal. The hardware was revised repeatedly across its life, through the DS Lite, DSi and DSi XL, each revision extending the run.