Just in time for the Christmas break, Retro Gamer pays tribute to the greatest-selling handheld of all time. Veteran coders, Paul Machacek and Paul Hughs explain what it was like coding for the dual-screened system, while ex-gaming journalists Matthew Castle and Simon Miller explain what it was like experiencing the likes of Nintendogs and Brain Training for the first time.
“I’m not sure I fully appreciated the DS at first glance,” recalls Matthew. “Back then you often thought about new hardware in terms of graphical grunt, and I was a bit too eager to focus on how good Mario 64 looked on a handheld, rather than the potential of its strange form factor. A handheld N64 is an attractive pitch, but it’s definitely not how I think of the DS now. It was the weirdness of what followed, enabled by its dual screens and colorful inputs, that really resonated.”
