What if Nintendo made the Switch instead of DS and Wii back in the day?

When Nintendo released the DS and Wii nearly two decades ago, it was clear that they were trying to take their hardware design in a different direction than their previous consoles. The DS had a stylus and second screen, while the Wii had motion controls. However, let’s imagine for a moment that instead of the DS and Wii, Nintendo had released the Switch in that same timeframe. What kind of specs would the Switch have if it was released in 2004 instead of 2017? If I were to take a guess, it would probably be somewhere between DS and 3DS graphics. This would have been good by 2004 standards in handheld mode, although it would have been bad when being played on a TV since the jaggies would be more noticeable on the big screen.

As for technology, the screen resolution would be better than the DS, perhaps the same as the PSP. Since USB-C never existed in 2004, Nintendo would have to include some proprietary port instead. Apart from that, I believe the “2004 Switch” would be very successful.

What about you? What are your thought on this? If you could go back in time and persuade Nintendo to abandon DS and Wii in favour of Switch, would you do it?

I think it would basically have been a Vita shell with PSP-ish specs and would have connected to TVs using the old scart connector basically. Best case. Would it have been successful? Hard to say....maybe.

Mobile tech has sorta just about hit the upper echelons of a hump where it's powerful enough to make games look decent on bigger screens. Still hasn't fully crossed it yet (and certainly not in 2017 when the switch released). Sony tried a Vita console before but, although Vita games looked great on the vita, when blown up onto a bigger screen they were blech. It was far worse for the PSP.

In saying that....The Nintendo PSP basically....could have been very tempting alright. So many games.

Would I have preferred them to go down that route instead of the Wii and DS? Absolutely not. Probably a very unpopular opinion here: but I love the Wii and DS. I thought they were great. So many great and interesting games across both systems. The industry is all the lesser due to a lack of variety in systems now. I'd love to see a proper Wii2. I'm secretly hoping the Switch 2 is bringing the DS thing back too somehow (and the 3D!!).

If Nintendo decided to dip their toes back into a console and basically made a mini PS5 with Wiimote and nunchuck 2.0 (more functionality and fixes the issues with the first version)....sign me the F up. I'd much rather that in a console instead of "It's the same thing we did 20 years ago with the same ol controller but just more pretty and Services!!!!"

Weird hypothetical. I think honestly we'd never truly appreciate a Switch without the missteps of the prior generations. IMO, as someone who used both the Wii/DS and WiiU/3DS, my frustrations with either is their weird split support between what they put on their consoles versus what they put on their handhelds. They never seemed to provide adequate equal support. They always seemed to focus on one at expense of the other. This also became an issue because of their support base being split between different systems. This led to commercial disappointments.

The Switch remedied a lot of this. Being a hybrid device makes it attractive to both the console and handheld crowd. It create a solid userbase to market games around, one device for developers to design their games for. Not to mention this was Nintendo's strongest tech leap since the N64 days.

Anyhow, Switch would have never worked back then, even if it was doable the tech would have cost a fortune. That's another draw of Nintendo, they've offered a certain degree of reasonable affordability.

What if they made the Super Wii U entertainment system instead of the Switch?

I don't know if they would have got all the grandmas that way.

I guess it would have ended up almost like the PSP-3000, which was a PSP with TV out and worked with PS3 controllers.