An Ode To Nintendogs, Who Have Been Waiting 10+ Years For You To Come Home

You probably haven’t fed your Nintendogs since 2006, but they’re still alive. Waiting for you to visit, living purely off their daily meals of equal parts resentment and hope. 

And since the Nintendo DS game sold just shy of 24 million copies worldwide (making it the 21st best selling game of all-time), that means there’s a whole lotta virtual dogs out there in the world, abandoned.

But attention must be paid. Even if we haven’t thought about Nintendogs for 10 years, the ripples of this video game were felt far and wide: you could even argue it changed gaming forever. Which is exactly what I’m about to do. But first…

Released in April 2005, Nintendogs more or less sold the Nintendo DS, their two-screened successor to the Game Boy Advance which had arrived six months before with more a whimper than a bang. Then these virtual puppers added a bark.

For those who don’t know, in Nintendogs you look after puppies who never age. You use the touch screen to pat, bather, play and teach your dogs tricks by yelling “ROLL OVER, ROLL OVER, ROLL OVER” into the DS’s microphone again and again until your mum told you to stop. You can also take them for walks and compete in agility, obedience and frisbee competitions. 

That’s it. You could have three dogs at once, too, and the important thing to know is there was no pug option. 

It launched with three versions – Dachshund & Friends, Lab & Friends, Chihuahua & Friends – which sounds like the tamest gang war ever. Meant to be played daily but without the danger of anything bad happening to your dog beyond fleas, you could come back three months later without the guilt that, say, Animal Crossing harbours, between the endless weeds and pass-ag comments from townfolk.

Having said that, the game received glowing reviews. Japanese magazine Famitsu gave it the coveted 40/40 score, while IGN and GameSpot alike were major fans too, since it’s really addictive and super fucking cute. The only real critique was how the game only let you go on a few walks and enter a few competitions a day, so you ran out of things to do after an hour or two. 

You could also train your dog to sit when you say a swear word. Normally, that’s borderline abusive but here it’s totally fine, since the dog is not real.

And, as said before, this shit went off. Selling 23.94 million copies is bloody impressive, which means more people have played Nintendogs than have listened to Katy Perry’s fifth album Witness, maybe.

While the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata referred to Nintendogs as a “non-game” when it was announced, with hindsight it’s clear it was at the forefront of casual games. 

While casual games – aka those which your technology-adverse relatives might play – have existed for a long time (ever heard of Tetris?), Nintendogs heralds the beginning of an onslaught. A load of other developers jumped on the trend too, at first more or less just literally copying the Nintendogs formula before finding their own ground.

While the idea of creative games designed to fit around people’s lives and be played in bite-sized, repetitious chunks is pretty obvious in the iPhone era, it was a novel idea in 2005. Casual gaming may be a billion dollar industry now, but 12 years ago it was a risk. Then Nintendogs charmed the world. Because they are are so bloody cute, even if by today’s standards these puppers are a complete pixel blur.

While I might concede this is a pretty basic argument, it totally holds. Even if Nintendogs didn’t invent casual gaming, it certainly proved its power.

Anyway, the real point is that your Nintendogs love and miss you. Dust off your DS, though there’s a 3DS sequel featuring cats too, but that feels a little blasphemous, imo.