Wii U

» see nintendo.com/wiiu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

by 2012 i was past the age of buying a home console at launch. i had a job and a backlog i was not getting through. wii u shipped in november 2012 with a gamepad you held like a tray and a launch lineup that nobody could remember a year later. i read the reviews on a hardware site and moved on. so did most other people.

nintendo had just sold around 100 million wiis to grandparents who wanted to swing a remote at a bowling pin. the follow-up needed to keep those people and bring back the audience that buys the games published by anyone other than nintendo. wii u did neither. the box looked like a wii and the brand sounded like a wii peripheral. parents who walked into a store thought they were buying a controller upgrade for the console already under their tv.

the device itself was a respectable piece of engineering. an hd nintendo console at last, with a six-inch resistive touchscreen on the controller that supported multiplayer modes where one person used the gamepad screen and the others used the television. the problem was nobody could explain why this should exist, and most third-party studios stopped pretending after the first year of weak sales.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it tried to be ~

the gamepad was the whole pitch. mario kart let the back-seat passenger steer with the controller while the front seat watched the lap. nintendo land at launch was a tech demo dressed as a party game, designed to teach the showroom shopper what the second screen could do. it taught very few of them.

splatoon arrived in 2015 and showed what a wii u could be when somebody actually built a game around it. by then the install base was small enough that even a hit felt like a curiosity. the same studio rebuilt the game for switch and sold ten times the copies.

~ what really happened ~

production stopped in japan on january 31 2017. the switch launched two months later with what was supposed to be a wii u zelda game, breath of the wild, ported up to the new hardware. nintendo never said the word "failure" but every interview about switch's design started with a description of what wii u got wrong: the controller that did not work outside the living room, and the brand that consumers heard as 'wii accessory'.

~ what got buried with it ~

wii u is the console where nintendo learned what hybrid actually had to mean. take the second screen off the controller and put it in your bag. the family living-room machine becomes a thing you can play on a plane. switch is wii u's apology and wii u is switch's tuition bill. 13 million people paid it and got a strange transitional object in return. some of them still defend it on forums. you can buy a working unit on the used market in ankara for less than a switch lite.

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