Nintendo DS Consoles, Games and Accessories

Released in 2004, the Nintendo DS featured its signature dual-screen design along with other capabilities such as an inbuilt microphone and wireless connectivity, which allowed multiple DS consoles in the same room to talk to each other without needing the Internet. Its main competitor was the PlayStation Portable (PSP), although both Nintendo and Sony were quick to say that each handheld aimed at different types of gamers.

(You might think that the Nintendo DS is the first Nintendo system to use two screens – and you’d be wrong. Way back before the Game Boy, Nintendo produced a series of games using an LCD screen known as the Game and Watch series – while most only used one screen, some games, such as Oil Panic, Donkey Kong and Green House, featured a dual-screen design that folded in half while the game wasn’t in use.)

The Nintendo DS was originally made to complement the GameCube and Game Boy Advance (GBA) systems, but due to the inbuilt backwards compatibility with GBA games, it eventually became the handheld’s successor. Some DS games could even detect that a GBA cartridge was in the system and unlocked extra features, most notably some hard-to-find Pokémon in Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum, which would appear depending on which GBA Pokémon game was in the system at the time.

With multiple hardware revisions (the DS Lite, DSi and DSi XL), the DS has become the best-selling handheld console ever, clocking in at over 154 million – putting it in second place for best-selling console of all time behind Sony’s PlayStation 2, which sits at over 155 million.