Nintendo 3DS: Diviner of the Future?
By:
Marc N. Kleinhenz
|
August 9, 2010, 7:11 pm
The modern era of the handheld market started, as these things always do, with Nintendo. On July 31, 1989, the Game Boy was released, simultaneously establishing the portable status quo for the next 15 years and spreading Tetris addictions across the Western hemisphere.
As lucrative as the tiny system (along with its several derivations and successors) was for Nintendo, it was merely a side-business, a monopolized market to be kept in the company’s back pocket – no pun intended – while it fought to retain its sales supremacy against Sega and Sony in the console wars. The lazy, leisurely jog instantly transformed into an earnest race, however, on May 13, 2003, when Sony, having already wrestled the title of “Console King of the World” from the Big N, announced that it would be taking the handheld world by storm with its PlayStation Portable. A productive-but-largely-irrelevant sub-industry quickly became the center attraction in a newfound fight for Nintendo’s life.
That something had to be done to stave off Sony’s death blow was a no-brainer. Complacency in the console side of the business had already resulted in two systems with terminated lifecycles for Nintendo. As its GameCube console dropped to second, and then quickly to third place in the global videogame race after Microsoft threw its hat into the ring. If the technologically superior and multimedia-friendly PSP would likewise bury the suddenly-archaic Game Boy, the erstwhile heavyweight would be relegated to belittled third-party status, as had recently happened to Sega. That something that needed to be done was the Nintendo DS.
The DS represented a two-prong strategy on Nintendo’s behalf. In the short term, the system was designed to steal some of Sony’s technical thunder. Being 64-bit, it could handle 3D graphics (although nowhere near as well as the PSP’s 128-bit architecture would allow). It also utilized Wi-Fi for online gaming, and even featured a back-lit screen, all elements which the Game Boy family sorely and noticeably lacked. In the long term, Nintendo decided to use its new handheld as an early field test, deploying some of the experimental gameplay interfaces that it was already researching for its upcoming console, the Wii. The portable’s dual screens, built-in microphone, and touch-screen input were all designed to not only allow hardcore gamers a new way to interact with their pre-existing gameplay styles, but to also expand the market to casual gamers. This market presumably lost track of videogames when controllers grew more face buttons and sprouted thumbsticks. Nintendo’s efforts with the DS to court this audience resulted in new types of software along the way, such as Nintendogs, Brain Training, and Cooking Mama.
Nintendo deliberately omitted some of the PSP’s flashier components, such as a disc drive (DS games would release on cartridges, just as Game Boy titles did before them), in order to keep its MSRP at $150, a considerable $100 cheaper than Sony’s portable, which resulted in a cheaper price tag. The DS’s gamble of essentially being two different systems targeting two entirely different user bases, succeeded, and succeeded phenomenally well. Released on November 21, 2004, the handheld had already accumulated a great deal of momentum before the PSP’s March 24, 2005 launch, and it never looked back – today, the global install base for both handhelds is 132 million and 60 million, respectively. At this rate, the DS will beat the PlayStation 2’s record-breaking 145 million units, most likely by the end of this year.
In retrospect, the differing philosophies behind the two units seems obvious enough. While one company sought to employ technology laterally -- to increase its audience -- the other did so vertically, to reach a coveted (but incredibly small) demographic located squarely in the stratosphere. Sony targeted these technophiles who just have to purchase the latest gizmo -- no matter the purpose or the cost -- by piling one multimedia functionality atop the other (PSP owners could buy movies on system-exclusive discs or download music and pictures from their PCs). There was an unintended (but still strongly felt) consequence of such a technologically progressive array of features, such as the large, sleek screen and optical disc format that drained batteries at an insanely fast rate. These features, when paired with constant firmware updates, severely constrained the playtime of casual users, the newfound keystone in Nintendo’s recently erected archway to success. In other words, while Nintendo was expanding, Sony was contracting. The subsequent sales figures are merely an afterthought and testament both to this initial decision.
There is more to the story of Sony’s entrance into handheld gaming than its being an intriguing historical anecdote. While Nintendo receiving a life-saving boost and Sony attaining its first failure in the rough-and-tumble videogame industry certainly played a fiscal role, no matter how minor, in the shaping of the next generation of console systems, it is in the tactical maneuvers between the DS and PSP that the future of the Wii and the PS3 – and, very likely, beyond – was made palpable. Nearly every facet of the Wii, from its non-gamer-friendly controller to its online functionality to, perhaps most tellingly, its approach to “multimedia” content (the inclusion of news and weather channels was intended to ease a potential-but-weary gamer to first pick up and then use the controller and was entirely inspired by the DS’s chat functionality), was entirely conceived in and foreshadowed by the DS’s wide umbrella of feature sets. Even the console’s success is, to a great extent, merely a spillover from the portable’s trailblazing. With the PSP, one can see the hubris that lead to a blunder-filled PlayStation 3 launch and, today, a drastically diminished Sony: the precarious arrangement of sizzling technologies, centered around the inclusions of a Blu-ray drive and the Cell microprocessor, causing a sky-high price tag of $600 and reinforced by the ironclad knowledge that the teeming audience for any and all Sony products would be more than happy to support it.
If, indeed, what’s past is prologue, then just as the DS was a prognosticator for the Wii, expect to get more than just a little glimpse of Nintendo’s sixth console through the soon-to-be-launched 3DS. Although details are, at present, largely scarce, there already is much to be possibly built off of, such as the 3DS’s constant efforts to seek out other systems with which to connect and interact. It is from such small seeds that an entirely new framework for the online structure of the Wii Too (or Wii HD or NES 6 or what have you) could emerge.
Plus, if Sony is truly soon to announce the PSP2, as constantly-swirling rumors suggest, then a still-murky future will become even more strikingly transparent.
Marc N. Kleinhenz is features editor at TotalPlayStation.com, as well as a freelance videographer. His latest fiction, a 12-page experimental webcomic entitled Immaterial Material Culture, can be found here.
