Its hard to imagine what hand held gaming would have evolved differently if this one little device had never been released. Would developers have continued to develop the interactive touch screen as a much as they have now? If not, what kind of nuance in gaming mechanics would we have gotten instead? More work on portable virtual reality? Or would we merely have gotten a portable device like the PSP, allowing regular console titles to be played on the go?

The biggest tragedy of this scenario however, is how many games that came out exclusively for the DS wouldn’t exist. Series like Phoenix Wright or Professor Layton wouldn’t have gotten off the ground or even stand alone titles that relied heavily on the DS’s hardware would have remained ideas in a developers head.

Here’s a list of games that would not have been released without a DS:

-Ghost Trick

-Okamiden

-Elite Beat Agents

-Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hour Glass

-Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2

-Solotorobo

-Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

-Chrono Trigger (re release)

-Fire Emblem Awakening

-Shin Megami Tensei 4

-The World Ends With You

– All Kingdom Hearts DS titles

-Trauma Center: Under the Knife

-Mario and Luigi Partners in Time

-Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride (re release)

-Contact

Those are just to name a few. Perhaps some of these titles would have been designed and released for different systems, but quite a few would be missing the level of interactivity which the DS is famed for. It is for this reason that with all the flak that Nintendo gets when it comes to their hardware, at least compared to Microsoft and Sony, they have done their fare share to innovate the gaming community and with creativity and outside the box thinking. With new games for a new generation on the horizon, fans will have a lot to look forward to for both a new console and hand held titles from Nintendo.