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In February 2004, former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi said, "If the DS succeeds, we will rise to heaven, but if it fails we will sink to hell." For once, Yamauchi wasn't being dramatic. Nintendo was officially in trouble.

When Nintendo publicly announced the operating loss, they announced that they would be releasing a new console in 2004, though they didn't specify whether it would be portable or for the home. Naturally, the public balked. It was not a good day for Nintendo. Many thought that the Game Boy Advance, being every bit as successful as its predecessor sales-wise, would guarantee Nintendo's continued health as a company, but keep in mind: their first bad fiscal year in history came in a period that saw not only the launch of the GBA SP, but also the launch of two new Pokémon games, the company's only true cash cow of the past eight years at that point. Matt Bozon of WayForward recalls, "I was designing Nitro (another of the DS' codenames) games prior to the public announcement, but I was still surprised. The first rumblings about the DS' existence came almost exactly one year before the system's North American launch. The only details were that the system would have two three-inch LCD displays. It was a Frankenstein's monster of a system, a seemingly random mishmash of disparate technologies thrown together in a desperate bid to differentiate itself from Sony's imminent PSP.

What wasn't apparent at the time was that Nintendo was realigning its identity with the announcement of the DS. If the new system was a home console, would it suffer from being underpowered by the time Microsoft and Sony announced their new machines? Even developers working on the DS at that point were in the dark about the system's specs. There are gamers who aren't as knowledgeable as you. (Their example: in a soccer game, you would have an overview of the game on one screen and a close up of individual players on the other. By November 2003, Nintendo's glory days of crushing market domination were long over and, for the first time in over 100 years as a business, the company reported its first operating loss. If it was to be a third platform, how will they entice consumers? Nintendo had to be desperate. A Nintendo-issued press release from January 2004 wasn't exactly illuminating. There wasn't anything in the documentation regarding a second screen or the touchscreen."

It wasn't until E3 2004 that the DS properly debuted. The GameCube, just two years on from its release in November 2001, dropped to $99 in an attempt to lure people away from the increasingly popular Xbox and the nigh-unstoppable PlayStation 2. Before Reggie Fils-Aime showed the device to the E3 audience for the first time, he said, "We understand that we are not just going to make games for hardcore gamers. [We are creating] new ways for you to relate to your games." It was hard to understand how this bizarre system was going to address new players. Gamers who don't have your tastes. What if it was some kind of kitschy failure like the Virtual Boy?

The actual announcement of the Nintendo DS (which, word had it, stood for "Developer's System") didn't allay anyone's fears. Not exactly an idea to light the world on fire.) It didn't, however, explain how the new system would be significantly different from Nintendo's 25-year-old, dual-LCD-screened Game & Watch games. The original prototype was bulky and cheap-looking, even in comparison to the first commercial model, now fondly nicknamed the DS Phat. Two screens, vertically arranged, the bottom of which was a touch panel, alongside a microphone capable of unique voice recognition, ad-hoc wireless communication, Wi-Fi network play, and backwards compatibility with GBA software. Sega's departure from the hardware market was fresh in everyone's mind at this point, and Nintendo's announcement recalled many of that company's failures. Gamers who aren't your age. The press release described how following action on two screens would revolutionize gaming by offering multiple perspectives on the action. By the middle of 2005, though, it was pretty clear just what Fils-Aime was talking about.

The paradox about the DS is that, despite its enormous success, it is hardly a perfect machine.  Low resolution, subpar graphics, limited audio capabilities, somewhat lackluster on-line capabilities (the iPod Touch is far more intuitive to use on-line and demands no inane friend codes), little to no built in memory (depending on which model we're talking about), and a library of shovelware mixed with some good ones.  And that original model was simply an abomination of design.  It's no wonder Nintendo took a page from Apple and redesigned its device so quickly.

The DS's success can be attributed more to the time it was released that its supposed revolutionary features.  People were looking for an upgrade from the Gameboy Advance and the DS came in at just the right time to fulfill that need.  Indeed, even today, most DS games resemble GBA games down to their very graphics and sound, and were it not for the touch screen support (which often times was just hastily added for navigating menus and the like), many of these games could have easily been done on the GBA and been very successful.