Entertaining that the Nintendo DS transformed the world from Games to Generation Z? Portable console released over 20 years ago marked the lives of many players and today represents a bait of nostalgiaporopus

I don’t remember exactly the first time I opened my Nintendo DS. As well as all the new toys, electronics and consoles I won in childhood, my DS must have been a gift. He was from the version Litecoral pink, with a small, short, shorts pen to match the matte blush on the inside of the console.

This was well before the time of cell phones, where iPhones Ancients began to fill kitchen drawers and empty shoe boxes. I used one Game Boy AdvanceSP Having, hardly conquered from the clutches of my brothers. But my Nintendo DS was the first video game console of our house that was mine and only mine.

In the records of the history of the games, the portable consoles usually mean which company is at the top – and which one is losing ground to their competitors. To the Nintendothe DS – a two -screen portable device compatible with touchscreen, made to fit in the pocket of medium pants – arrived at the same time as its newest portable threat: the PlayStation Portable (PSP). It was a successful risk, a console that became one of the best selling game systems of all time. But although the development of DS And some of your most popular games are recognized as a lucky accident, this future vision machine has made more than inaugurating a type of game device. It inaugurated a cultural expansion of what games could be – and for who could be.

Many of the risky design choices of the Nintendo DS They made the console not only accessible but also aesthetically unique. Following the model of buttons Game Boyinstead of coupling a new joystick for the thumb like the PSPthe classic games for the DS They had to be formatted with the button system. The touch screen, the microphone and the Stylus pen allowed even those with little dexterity for typical shooting games to find the perfect fun. But along with the double screen, came games of great success and a huge recognition of the number of players who existed.

Video games have always been a gender area. “I don’t think I can emphasize enough how bad the game industry was to involve women anyway,” he said Keza MacDonaldGames Publisher of Guardian , Rolling Stone in November. “There was a white letter to be incredibly sexist in advertising.” But with the Nintendo DSIt was difficult to ignore that many of the bestseller games on the console were made for girls.

Nintendogs (2005) allowed players to bathe, walk and train puppies. Just let the dog abandoned for a long time and you would return to a puppy infested with fleas and whimpering. But playing regularly, you could develop a highly trained and award -winning elegant puppy kennel. With this came the development of more games that today we would call adjacent cozy, like Animal crossing, Cooking breast or my favorite failure, The Urbz: Sims in the City. There was also Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training (2005), which combined educational mini games such as puzzles, word memory or Sudoku and was also created to be played every day using the voice or touch features of DS. Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training It was one of the ten games of DS best selling in the US in 2008. Nintendogs Original sold 20 million units – even surpassing Mario Kart DS. But his success also highlighted statistics previously unknown or misunderstood. Almost half of the owners of DS They were women.

This focus and appreciation for lifestyle games have transformed the DS of a simple console on a device that defined a generation. For many generation Z players, the DS It was the first version of a smartphone. The aesthetics was elegant. It was easy to transport, which meant simple to hide in a backpack or closet. And at a time when unlimited text messages were not yet a possibility, the wireless capacity of the DS transformed the appeal Pictochat in an unlimited place for discussion and connection between friends. Subsequent iterations of the device only strengthened this, with the addition of cameras, giving users the ability to record what we today recognize as some of the worst quality videos of all time. One DS – at a cost lower than that of a PlayStation “And you were exposed to a world of games that would have been considered experimental two years earlier.” But it was enough to have another friend with DS And now you can live in a community.

For many generation Z players, the DS It is also a physical representation of the first experiences of generation with online and digital communities. For many girls, their portable nature allowed a first type of property that often did not happen with larger consoles. It also has an incredibly recognizable aesthetics: those two screens, the flip, the texture of the pen while people slid it through the control buttons. The most recent editions of the DS They added resources, but maintained the most striking features, making it a recognizable bait of Nostalgia of Generation Z. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a 75% increase in games, according to the Verizon. This interest combined in full force in the age of nostalgia – which led to a reassessment of the consoles that changed people. Fans taking the DS For events such as parties or shows they even became a meme, with the commentators agreeing that, even with the sound and useless filming, the physical act of seeing those two erected screens still looked right.