“I felt that the identity of the Wii Remote was worth continuing, and that combining the jump to HD visuals with the jump to ‘HD motion control’ of the ‘Wii Remote Plus’ would have been a smart play. “The fact that Wii U did not come bundled with a Wii Remote was really disappointing to me,” he says.
He felt there should still have been a role for the Wii Remote in the new era. Veteran developer Rhodri Broadbent of Dakko Dakko, once worked for Q-Games in Japan, and met Shigeru Miyamoto while making Star Fox Command.
But there was also nothing as immediately compelling as Wii Sports or Wii Play – nothing that completely crystallised the idea of the GamePad. There were intriguing moments: Nintendo Land has the clever asymmetrical multiplayer action of Luigi’s Ghost Mansion and the boisterous arena-battler Animal Crossing: Sweet Day. The machine would arrive with only two major Nintendo titles, the mini-game collection Nintendo Land, and New Super Mario Bros U, a decent side-scrolling platformer, but by no means a major Mario title with with little involvement from Miyamoto. However, even before the launch, the games media was complaining about a lack of compelling first-party content. Were we going to get new game paradigms like we did with the Wii and its controllers?” “I had done work on the N64, Gameboy, GameCube and Wii and I still maintain they were my favourite systems to work on, so when the WiiU was announced it had me excited,” says Byron Atkinson-Jones of Xiotex Studios, “I wanted to see how far we could go in game design terms with the two screen setup. In the months following E3, it was at least picking up interest from the development community. Those people were now quietly migrating to other platforms: smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes. Instead, it needed to convert the tens of millions of Wii owners who’d rarely bought consoles before who’d been seduced by the Wii Remote controller and the immediate, social experience it promised. It was all academic anyway: barely a year later, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One arrived to completely change the technological landscape.īut Nintendo wasn’t competing with PlayStation and Xbox, and never really had. But before the launch, developers were already whispering to news sources that this was not the case – driving the second-screen would eat up the graphics processing power and the CPU wasn’t that special.
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There had been rumours that, with its custom AMD 7 series graphics chipset and IBM multicore central processor, the machine would be more powerful than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 – especially as it was arriving years after those machines debuted. Even when it became clear that Wii U was a whole new console, with a unique motion-sensitive screen pad, consumers were nonplussed. In some ways, that misunderstanding never went away.
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Composite: Xbox One S v PS 4 Pro v PS4 Slim v Project ScorpioĪ masterpiece of understatement. The PS4 and Xbox One, high-powered machines arrived and changed the gaming landscape. The crowd whooped, but when the lights went down, a few expressed confusion: was the Wii U GamePad an extension to the original Wii? Was it an entirely new console? That evening, in an interview with the Evening Standard, the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata stated: “Because we put so much emphasis on the controller, there appeared to be some misunderstanding.” After this, came a showreel of gaming moments, then nothing. Reggie-Fils-Aimé, head of Nintendo America, gave an obtuse introduction and showed the unique GamePad controller, with its built-in display. Then, there it was at the Nintendo press conference, in front of the whole games industry. The E3 presentation was supposed to be the big reveal. Before that, Nintendo had made vague references to Project Cafe, a new piece of hardware deep in development at the company’s famed R&D labs, but the nature of the device was unclear. What happened? How did Nintendo, one of the oldest and most respected companies in the video game industry, get it so wrong? And did anything good come out of the Wii U era? How will the machine be remembered, if at all?Ĭertainly, some believe the console was cursed from the start – right from the first announcement at the 2011 E3 video game conference in Los Angeles. The follow-up machine to the hugely successful Wii had sold fewer than 15m units worldwide since its launch in 2012. I n late January it was announced that Nintendo had ceased production of the Wii U console.
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