The Switch was Nintendo’s last roll of the dice. By the beginning of this year, the company was in dire straits: a decade on from the breakout success of the motion-controlled Wii, its follow-up, called the Wii U, had failed to take the world by storm.

A quirky machine, the Wii U replaced the controller with a hybrid tablet, seeking to replicate the success of Nintendo’s handheld DS console, which has two screens. Instead, weak launch sales and a poor initial lineup of games, combined with confusing branding that left many unclear whether it was even a new device at all, served to hand the console generation to Sony and Microsoft, who focused their fire on traditional gamers.

The DS and its follow-ups, the 3DS (which upgraded one of the screens with a glasses-free 3D effect) and the New 3DS, had more success, but faced increasing competition from smartphones and tablets in the race to provide people on the move with something to do.

Nintendo had seen the smartphone threat coming, and licensed its brands to third-party developers to create smartphone games, in a bid to boost its bottom line. Unfortunately, its biggest smartphone success was the runaway hit Pokémon Go, for which it received only a licensing fee and compensation for development time. (When it pointed that out, its shares fell by 17% overnight.)

So the Switch was born from an attempt to kill two birds with one stone: provide a handheld games console with enough power to keep gamers from moving to smartphones, while simultaneously (re)building a presence in the living rooms of those who had bailed on the company five years before.

Gamers get to grips with the Nintendo Switch’s multiplayer capabilities. Photograph: Nintendo

It was a gamble, particularly given the state of the console before its launch: a high price (£279, £80 more than the Xbox One or PS4), with a slim selection of games, and a limited set of features and launch titles that betrayed the fact that it had been rushed on to shelves before the end of the financial year.

But in the end, that didn’t matter. The one major launch game – Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda sequel Breath of the Wild – was an enormous critical and commercial success, earning praise like “best launch title for 20 years” and, for a brief period, selling more copies than there were Nintendo Switches available to play them on.

The device’s versatility won plaudits too. The ability to play games on the go or at home, and reuse the controllers to play multiplayer games using just what’s in the box, meant that word of mouth spread rapidly. The Switch has been back-ordered ever since, with a sales lag of roughly two weeks as Nintendo struggles to fulfil demand.

Looking forward, there’s more hope for the company. Over the next six months, the first major exclusive titles for the console will arrive (Breath of the Wild, although compelling, was simultaneously released on the Wii U): multiplayer games like ARMS and Splatoon 2 this summer, followed in the autumn by Super Mario Odyssey, the first major Mario console game in seven years.

In the longer term, Nintendo may find that its daring gambit pays a strategic dividend too. The Xbox One and PS4 are, at their hearts, traditional PCs with powerful graphic cards and bluetooth controllers.

The reason the Switch appears underpowered is that it’s more like a mobile phone than a PC: running an Arm processor, with a built-in screen and a third-party graphics chip made by Nvidia. But over the next decade, mobile phones will experience far greater investment and improvement than old-school PCs, and Nintendo is perfectly positioned to piggyback on that investment for its own benefit.

At heart, though, everything comes back to the games. Without Breath of the Wild, the Switch wouldn’t have stood a chance, and Nintendo will need to keep the hits running for the console to reverse the public’s perception of the company as the loser of the console world.

• This article was amended on 25 May 2017. In the editing process, “major” was lost from the description of Super Mario Odyssey as “the first major Mario console game in seven years”. This has been restored.

