

Its success also earned it a sequel with Nintendogs + Cats for the 3DS launch, which sought to expand on the foundations of the original by combining newer features such as the front-facing camera and AR functionality.
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Ultimate and its predecessors paid homage to the series by featuring a level inspired by Nintendogs, complete with Assist Trophies and Spirits that show off the adorable Toy Poodle, French Bulldog, and Labrador Retriever. It's no surprise that after becoming such a big seller in Nintendo's line-up, Nintendogs saw plenty of appreciation and recognition from other games. In addition, though it performed admirably in Japan, the game positively exploded within Europe, becoming Nintendo's top-selling game that year with 1.6 million copies sold and overall selling 23.96 million copies worldwide, beaten to Nintendo's top spot by New Super Mario Bros. The game became so popular that it earned gained celebrity endorsements, with the likes of Paris Hilton declaring herself a Nintendogs fan. While all breeds were ultimately unlockable through gameplay, making the version differences a little perfunctory, all the released versions boosted sales for the DS fourfold from the previous week. The choice was made by Nintendo to keep Shiba Inu & Friends as a unique release to Japan given the breed's popularity, with Labrador & Friends replacing it for the European and North American markets.īest Friends was also another region-specific release, only ever making it to North America, making it somewhat of an outlier from its siblings. Approximately 5 different versions were sold upon release, several of which were region-specific: Labrador & Friends, Dalmatian & Friends, Daschund & Friends, and Shiba Inu & Friends, with a fifth version innocuously titled Best Friends. The initial release of Nintendogs was one of the DS's launch titles actually saw it receive multiple different iterations of the same base game. Inspired by his own experience of owning a family dog, Nintendogs finally got off the ground and its scope quickly expanded to make use of all the DS's new features, focusing gameplay on utilizing the new touchscreen functionality and capitalizing on the portability to further expand its reach with other players. Perhaps Nintendogs might have seen its release on the Game Cube instead, but as the DS was in development, it was Shigeru Miyamoto who took the executive decision to bring the concept to the handheld console.
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Shockingly, the original concept behind Nintendogs saw it begin life back in the days of the Nintendo 64 as a prototype pet breeding simulator called Cabbage, but while the initial game eventually saw its development drop off, the ideas and conversations that went into its development carried on. RELATED: Great Games to Introduce Non-Gamers to the Hobby The History And Success Of Nintendogs With the release of Nintendo Switch Sports and the recent popularity of 'non-game' games, now is the right time to bring Nintendogs back to the scene. Not only would it have been perfectly suited to the platform, combining the benefits of handheld, touchscreen, and motion control play styles, but it could have continued its legacy of appealing to non-gamers since its inception.

It's disappointing, then, that at the time the Switch was launched, Nintendogs was uncharacteristically absent from its line-up. The franchise still lives on, though, with its last entry serving as launch title for the 3DS and expanded to Nintendogs + Cats, illustrating that Nintendo continues to have faith in the series. Were it not for Nintendogs and its meteoric rise to become the Nintendo DS's second best-selling game in its lifetime, games like Wii Sports or Wii Fit may never have come to pass to carry the torch for 'non-gamers'. Launched back in 2005 as one of the Nintendo DS's main launch titles, Nintendogsrapidly became a hit among players and successfully enshrined itself as the beginning of a 'non-game' trend, drawing in crowds of gamers.
