Nintendo: how digitalization makes nostalgia continue.

When my brothers and I were younger, we always tried to one-up each other by waking up as early as possible on the weekends. Not for nothing, the first one who waked up could play as first on my big brother’s Nintendo DS. He, my older brother, got it for his birthday and we all fell in love right away. We hadn’t experienced any way of video gaming before, so with the Nintendo DS, we emerged in a new world of playing games. We collected all sorts of games: Zoo Tycoon, the Avatar; the legend of Aang game, and the ultimate classics Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart. I loved playing on the DS and bought eventually my own; the Nintendo DS XL. I wouldn’t call myself a hardcore gamer, more of a so-called ‘casual gamer’. Which perfectly fits with the Nintendo target audience. Nintendo is for the people who want to play accessible games and like to have a concise consoler to play and travel with. Almost everyone knows the Nintendo DS, it is a game device that many played very fanatically. So for me, when I was a 9-year-old kid, the Nintendo DS was an amazingly fun gaming device to play with.

As I said before, the Nintendo DS was my first experience with gaming and therefore also with online gaming. I was fascinated by the option to take your own DS and connect it to another so that you and your friend could play a game together on your own device at the same time. It was an awesome discovery which me, my older brother and younger brother used a lot amongst each other and with our friends. You could befriend each other on the DS and texts and sent photos back and forth. It was the first way for me to communicate with friends from a distance, which was eventually replaced by the mobile telephone years later.

The Nintendo DS my brother had. Image found on the site of Game Solution.

Not only was playing on the Nintendo DS my first experience as a casual gamer, but it was also my first explosion to making photos all by myself. My parents had photo cameras but I couldn’t always use them to take pictures because they were too expensive to be used as toys for us. Having my own Nintendo DS made it possible for me to take pictures of anything I wanted, however much I wanted. Which led to many pictures of me and my brothers with many crazy different filters and drawings on them. This was in some way actually the precursor to the now popular Snapchat and Instagram, on which I also like to take and share photos.

The Nintendo DS is a very nostalgic phenomenon for me. When the hype of the Nintendo DS died down for me and my brother, I stopped playing these games for a long time. Years went by and I hadn’t anything to replace the DS with. I played some games on my laptop or phone, but it was not the same as playing the Mario Bros/Kart games with the DS. Nintendo succeeded to take these nostalgic games and breathed new life into them: on the third of March in 2017 the Nintendo Switch was released and it was an instant hit. The Switch could hit the same target audience as the DS did, it was accessible and you could carry it around easily. The wide range of games you could play on it was also nice, from Animal Crossing to Pokémon, and most importantly; all the Mario games were available newer than ever. My boyfriend bought one and since then we enjoy playing Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe together. It’s the new version of the Super Mario Bros I loved to play on the DS. Seeing all the nostalgic characters again and playing all the new, fun and even hidden levels were – and still are – a digital innovation I appreciate. Needless to say, Nintendo will always be nostalgic in some ways. Additionally, it will also stay captivating to keep playing and enjoying. 🙂