They tried to claim that they weren’t ending the game boy line…welp. Still waiting on that Game Boy Advance sucsessor any day now…
We all know the DS was the next Game Boy. WHY DIDN’T THEY JUST CALL IT THAT??? The original ones even played GBA, GBC, and GB games for fucks sake!
The DS WAS a Game Boy. That’s it. That’s the end of the story.
The DS exists because of the PSP. It was Nintendo acknowledging they couldn’t just be the too-cheap-not-to-own, baseline-sufficient, mobile gaming experience. The PSP did 3D shit on a level the GBA simply could not compete with, even when the SP was like $70 new. Sony came out the gate with PS2 graphics, in your damn pocket.
So - Nintendo got weird. They are a toy company. They do not compete. They want to be the only company that offers [blank]. And in the DS’s case, that was a ridiculous two-screen setup, hearkening back to the Game & Watch days, but modernized enough to have a touchscreen… and goofy scanline-rendered 3D that basically guaranteed 60 Hz performance. The restrictions for that are why DS ports were still kinda wacky.
What’ll really blow people’s dicks off is that Nintendo nearly called it the City Boy. After a now-obscure Japanese fashion magazine that was, I shit you not, probably the reason Mario wears a red shirt and blue overalls.