Nintendo announced the Switch 2 today. The conventional wisdom is that it’s “boring,” but in a good way—finally, Nintendo has settled down into an almost Sony-esque cadence of numbering its consoles in sequence. The Verge’s Andrew Webster summed up this view:

Really, the form factor of the Switch didn’t need changing. It’s clear consumers loved it; Nintendo has sold more than 146 million of them, as the Switch inches closer to toppling the DS as the company’s bestselling piece of hardware. It’s flexible in a way that made sense for a large group of people, and it helped spearhead a renewed interest in portable gaming, one that is now taking the PC world by storm. Even Microsoft and Sony are tentatively getting into the space. And by merging its portable and console development teams, Nintendo was able to focus on a single device and greatly improve the cadence of new releases. Over its eight years of existence, the Switch had surprisingly few lulls between major new games.

The Switch will outsell the DS and may yet dethrone the PlayStation 2, despite the latter having the enormous advantage of having been the first and only DVD player that many people ever owned, right at the peak of the physical media era (2005, the year before the PlayStation 3 and Blu-ray Disc tech came out, was the top year for DVD sales). A portable console that can output in HD to your TV seems blasé now, a surefire winner. But it wasn’t obvious at all in 2016.

Surviving the smartphone gaming era

In the run-up to the Switch’s unveiling that fall, there was a lot of confused talk about how Nintendo was building a cartridge-based system, in an era in which its two rivals (the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One) were all-in-one media centers with their Blu-ray drives. It seemed like a recipe for doom, especially on the heels of how badly the Wii U had sold. Nintendo hadn’t sold a cart-based home system since the Nintendo 64, which, while fondly remembered by some millennials today, was a major failure in that it permanently ceded a huge segment of the gaming market to Sony, and mostly on account of its usage of expensive, low-capacity carts at a time when cheap, high-capacity CDs were becoming the norm.1

The 3DS—the DS’s lookalike successor—was the only thing keeping Nintendo solvent during the lean 2011-2017 era, when Wii-mania had ended and almost no one seemed interested in its successor. Even its success was qualified—though it sold over 75 million units, that was only about half of the DS’s haul. Moreover, the idea of a dedicated handheld with a ton of buttons seemed antiquated in the era of smartphone gaming.

The early and mid 2010s were the “smartphone gaming” era, when gaming on your phone felt novel and limitless in its possibilities. I remember seeing a bar graph on Business Insider about how Angry Birds had already “outsold” the entire Super Mario series. The simplicity of touch controls plus the ability to add overlay controls onto a touchscreen (i.e., virtual buttons) seemed like the “end of history” for mobile gaming.

In a 2013 post cheekily titled Nintendo in Motion2, John Gruber said:

Nintendo is doing poorly because they seem incapable of producing best-of-breed hardware, both in console and handheld. The world has changed in the last five years, and hundreds of millions of people now carry powerful, well-made, touchscreen computers with them everywhere they go. Nintendo should expand to start making games optimized for these devices—in the short term as [an] opportunity to sell more games, in the long term as a hedge for the possibility that the company will no longer be able to compete at all in hardware.

He was responding to a Lukas Mathis post that had said “Mac analysts” (a catch-all term for Apple-focused bloggers like Gruber) had an obsession with Nintendo that resembled the obsession Microsoft analysts once had with Apple (thinking it should just stop making hardware, etc.)

Nowadays, Mac analysts have a similar obsession with Nintendo. The logic goes a bit like this: Nintendo is doing poorly because Apple and Samsung own the market for portable devices. If only Nintendo stopped making hardware and published their games for iOS instead, surely, it would do much better.

Mac users should understand why this argument is flawed. Fantastic games like Super Mario 3D Land can only exist because Nintendo makes both the hardware and the software. That game simply could not exist on an iPhone. Nintendo makes its own hardware because that allows it to make better, more interesting, unique games.

But there’s an additional problem with this argument: the premise is completely wrong. Nintendo is actually not doing poorly in the portable market. iPhones have not destroyed the market for portable gaming devices. The 3DS is, in fact, doing very well.

Gruber turned out to be completely wrong whereas Mathis was completely right. In fact, the success of the 3DS was a turning point in gaming history, although it wasn’t recognized at the time and maybe not even now.

How the 3DS changed the game

The 3DS was widely perceived as just a DS with stereoscopic (glasses-free) 3D technology and maybe a little more horsepower. In reality, it was ridiculously capable for a handheld gaming device:

  • It was in practice almost as powerful as a PlayStation 2, with the ability to run complex games such as Dragon Quest VII, Super Smash Bros. For 3DS, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and Xenoblade Chronicles3. The “3D” in its name wasn’t just about the stereoscopic effect, which was largely gimmicky—it was also about the console’s plethora of fully 3D titles, games that the original DS couldn’t possibly have run.
  • It had an analog stick (and a camera stick on later models) and tons of buttons, plus two cameras.
  • Also, it was compatible with the entire DS library.

Nintendo priced it very high, seeming to realize it had built a colossus. But it took a while for people to catch on. The price was quickly cut and it was only in 2013 that the release schedule finally started humming with titles such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and Luigi’s Mansion 2. As Mathis noted, these types of games, with their clever use of the dual screens and complex controls, were simply impossible on the featureless face of an iPhone.

Rather than an antique avatar of a bygone dedicated handheld age, the 3DS was the herald of a new era in mobile gaming, when tiny bespoke hardware could run titles that phones and tablets couldn’t touch and that rivaled home consoles and PCs in their complexity.

Even now, the 3DS’s library is astonishing in its depth, with everything from addictive puzzle games to mature-themed visual novels. The only Nintendo console with a similar depth and breadth of titles is the Switch, which I think is better thought of as the successor to the 3DS than the Wii U.

The iPhone moment for console gaming

With its ability to read Amiibo, its use of ROM cartridges and microSD cards, its ARM processor, its dual sticks, and its big screen, the Switch is like a slightly tweaked New 3DS4. The original Switch instantly made other gaming options, whether less (phones, tablets) or more (PCs, home consoles) complicated seem instantly outmoded, in the way that the original iPhone did for flip and feature phones in 2007. Gruber sees this:

That it’s just a bigger faster Switch is proof of the genius of the Switch form factor, which has now been widely copied across the industry. The Switch is to handheld + dockable console gaming what the iPhone is to phones.

Its variety of buttons and sensors made smartphone gaming seem too simple; its instantaneousness and portability made hulking PCs and consoles seem like heavy, slow, power-hungry dinosaurs. The only traces of the Wii U were (sort of) the tablet design from that console’s controller, but again, I think the form factor of the 3DS is a closer analog.

It shocked me at the time, in a way I don’t think any of its successors may ever do. Its success is maybe the best example I can think of the “hindsight is 20/20” cliché, but to really see why it was set up for success from day one, you have to see the 3DS for what it was—a signpost to the future rather than the past, maybe even “Nintendo’s iPod,” in how it led to “Nintendo’s iPhone” (the Switch).


  1. The Switch represented Nintendo’s final divorce from optical disc technology, which had bedeviled it for almost 30 years at that point. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was supposed to have had a CD-ROM attachment made by Sony, but the parties fell through and it became the PlayStation 1; the Nintendo 64 lost big to the PS1 because of how much easier CDs were to develop for; the GameCube, Wii, and Wii U all ran on proprietary optical disc formats designed to avoid paying royalties to Sony et al., but which came with the drawback of lower capacity than either generic DVD or Blu-ray. Now, optical discs are far too slow to actually run games from (PS4/5 and Xbox games are simply copied from the disc to the internal drive) and they put a major constraint on form factor. Neither is true of ROM carts, which remain super-fast, can be really tiny, and now can hold tons of data. ↩︎

  2. A reference to Research In Motion, the old name of BlackBerry. ↩︎

  3. This only ran on the New 3DS, which had extra processing power and more inputs (two more shoulder buttons and a second analog stick) ↩︎

  4. In addition to the more powerful ARM processor, extra buttons, and second stick, the New 3DS had a built-in Amiibo reader and used microSD cards rather than full-size ones like the original 3DS. ↩︎