Demae Channel

~ the obituary ~

the wii sold over a hundred million units worldwide and exactly none of the ones outside japan could order you a pizza. the demae channel was not held back by a licensing delay that never resolved. it was wired directly into demaecan, a japanese delivery aggregator, with japanese restaurants at the far end, and there was nothing underneath it to export.

it went up on the wii shop channel on 26 may 2009 as a free download, built by denyusha and published by nintendo. the first thing it asked for was your home address, which it kept. after that you were looking at a menu of food categories: pizza, bento, sushi, curry, party trays, desserts. if you could not decide there was a roulette that decided for you, which is a feature nobody would ship on a phone and which makes perfect sense on a television.

picking a category gave you the shops actually within delivery range of the address you had entered, with opening hours and an estimated arrival time. you chose a dish, set the size and the toppings, and confirmed. the money changed hands at the door, in cash, when the food turned up. a receipt landed in the wii message board, the same inbox that held letters from other consoles. it kept a favorites list and a record of everything you had ordered before.

i was twenty five when this launched and on the wrong side of the planet for it. turkey had its own online food ordering by then and it lived on a browser, where anyone outside japan would have assumed it belonged. what is worth noticing is not that i missed it but that it existed at all: a games console shipped a working commercial food service for eight years, in one country, and almost nobody outside that country ever saw the screen.

~ the case file ~

~ how it survived ~

in april 2013 nintendo announced it was pulling the plug on most of the wii's online channels, because wiiconnect24 was going away and the channels that depended on it went with it. the demae channel kept working. it had never been built on wiiconnect24, since a food order is a live request rather than a message left in a mailbox overnight, and so it sat there for four more years after the rest of the wii menu went quiet.

a wii u version arrived on 8 august 2013, under the delivery company's own name rather than nintendo's. it was a downgrade. the wii original had bespoke menus and a soundtrack with a different theme for each food category, credited to kazumi totaka. the wii u release just opened demaecan's website on the gamepad. that is the moment the idea stops being a console feature and becomes a browser bookmark.

~ the day it died ~

on 22 february 2017 nintendo announced both versions were coming off the wii shop channel and the eshop. the service itself was switched off on 31 march 2017. no lawsuit and no acquisition. by then every one of its users had a smartphone with the same delivery company's app on it, and the app knew where they were without being told.

demaecan is still trading and is one of the larger delivery businesses in japan. the thing that died is the console as a place you did errands. for a few years the wii was trying to be a household appliance rather than a games machine, and the food channel is the clearest surviving evidence of how far that went.

~ what it became ~

in 2020 a group of homebrew developers started rebuilding the dead wii channels on their own servers, under the name wiilink. demae support arrived in august 2022, and by march 2023 people with a modified wii in the united states or canada could order domino's through it again. deliveroo was added in april 2023 and dropped that september. just eat went live for europe in april 2026.

so the channel outlived its own shutdown by nine years and counting, on hardware that was discontinued and servers nintendo has nothing to do with. the original was japan only for a boring commercial reason. the revival is not, which means more people can now order dinner on a wii than could when it was a supported product.

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