This feature is taken from The Console Chronicles, an upcoming book that we’re working on in conjunction with Lost in Cult. If you like what you see, you can pre-order a copy using the link below.
Please note that some external links on this page are affiliate links, which means if you click them and make a purchase we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Please read our FTC Disclosure for more information.
I began eighth grade in September 2014. After my first day of classes, I excitedly changed into exercise clothes as it was time to start tennis practice for the year. I was ecstatic, tennis being my favourite sport. Standing in the middle of three courts, drills unfolding on either side of me, I got to playing. It couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes into the session by the time that I found myself with my feet where my head should’ve been, my wrist making first contact with the court upon landing after a Loony Tunes-type accident saw me slip on a haphazard ball which rolled in from another court. I picked myself up, held my arm out straight to assess the damage… and my wrist swung like a saloon door well past ninety degrees. All that remained between my forearm and hand were fragments of bone. It took mere hours before I was in a full-arm cast.
But this injury and its accompanying pity provided me with something that I’d wanted since its launch: a Wii U. After being denied one during Christmas 2012 (as it turned out, I was receiving an iPod Touch that year, unbeknownst to me at the time), I finally reopened the conversation. I loved my 3DS, but part of me always itched for Nintendo’s HD home system, too, which I obviously couldn’t afford since I was eleven at the time of its release. Two years later, dejected from the loss of my tennis season and grappling with a serious injury, my ethos made a strong enough case for the console.
The Wii U was a commercial disaster. Not even Nintendo would deny that, selling a mere thirteen million units total as of the last reported sales data in 2019
Sort of. In a deal that I should’ve negotiated in hindsight, my parents drove me to the store to get the Wii U. I paid for it by trading in years upon years upon years of old hardware and games. They did cover the remaining cost of Mario Kart 8 after the majority of my GameCube and Wii collection didn’t quite go the distance in trade-in credit (I feel queasy writing that) and bought me some accessories. I returned home with a 32GB Wii U Deluxe Set, New Super Mario Bros. U and New Super Luigi U packed in, as well as the aforementioned copy of Mario Kart 8. And that, I was certain, would be my entry point into a long generation with this sterling, flagship machine.
The Wii U was a commercial disaster. Not even Nintendo would deny that, selling a mere thirteen million units total as of the last reported sales data in 2019. Given that the Switch has since outsold the Wii U at a rate above ten-to-one, there’s little doubt that on a dime, Nintendo turned its fortunes around.
Ask just about anyone what Wii U’s legacy is, and they’ll tell you that, although the system failed, it was a prototype Nintendo Switch. That the GamePad’s off-TV functionality was proof of concept for its successor’s hybrid design. I distinctly remember enjoying Mario Kart 8 on the GamePad as my family flicked on yet another nightly cooking show. And that was great — but didn’t feel like anything I hadn’t been doing with Mario Kart 7 or DS before it. To me, off-TV play just made my Wii U into a clumsy handheld replacement when I was well into year three of being inseparable from my 3DS. Off-TV play isn’t why I loved my Wii U, why I lugged it to and from college all four years despite having a Switch in my backpack alongside it. My Wii U doesn’t occupy HDMI 3 to this day because it offers a primordial Switch experience. My appreciation requires decoupling the system from its successor.
Released in November 2012, the Wii U’s initial suite of titles suggested a unique priority: proving that the Wii U GamePad could evoke the unique joy of two-screen home console play. At the core of this effort sat a launch title which encapsulated all that the system hoped to stand for: Nintendo Land. For my money, it was every bit as effective as Wii Sports but even richer, a crossover on a scale typically reserved for Super Smash Bros. It aptly distilled the company’s spirit and history into a series of easily digestible but nonetheless replayable attractions through its theme park motif.
Most importantly, Nintendo Land demonstrated what the GamePad could do. The answer, it turned out, was just about anything. In the mini-game Takamaru’s Ninja Castle, it was the platform from which you launched throwing stars with a swipe of a finger. In the multiplayer Luigi’s Ghost Mansion, it was the asymmetric screen from which one player stalked others on the TV as an invisible poltergeist. The tablet controller was a mirror of the TV’s action, but instead a complement.
Perhaps the most novel usage sees you doing your best Rear Window impression, treating the GamePad as a camera to snap photos of people in the surrounding buildings, those rendered on the TV
New Super Mario Bros. U — a comparatively straightforward adventure — thought of the GamePad not as a way to platform while your family watched a movie, but instead to invite an extra player into the fray. Boost Mode, its marquee gimmick, allowed a fifth person to place temporary platforms for the other four scampering around the stage. In fairness, it wasn’t a particularly deep idea. Nonetheless, it reinforced that the Wii U was interested in showcasing how a detached touch screen could explore previously impossible gameplay concepts.
Many of the Wii U’s best games ventured further down this design path, always wondering what more the GamePad could do. 2013’s oft-overlooked (and now ludicrously expensive) Game & Wario stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the most unique software on the platform, having arguably the most GamePad ideas per square inch. The only “WarioWare” game to forgo microgames as the driving force behind its overarching structure, Game & Wario instead has you turning the GamePad inside out as you ponder all that the controller can achieve in larger mini-games. Perhaps the most novel usage sees you doing your best Rear Window impression, treating the GamePad as a camera to snap photos of people in the surrounding buildings, those rendered on the TV. This creates a particularly intimate relationship between the TV and GamePad that sees each talking to the other in a way no other system can recreate.
We’d have to wait until 2015 for the next wave of titles that truly had this two-screen dynamic at the core of their design. First came Splatoon. I don’t think a day passed that summer where I didn’t play the game, enjoying this funky multiplayer explosion of creativity. Its success was infectious, becoming one of few Wii U titles that reminded the industry at large that Nintendo is not to be counted out even in its lowest moment. Winner of Best Multiplayer at the 2015 Game Awards ceremony (an accolade I wouldn’t shut up about at school, blabbing about it to my Wii U-hating friends), Splatoon felt like a turning point. It seemed like another affirmation that the GamePad mattered. From a revelatory gyro aiming system to novel between-round mini-games and battle functionality mid-match, the controller was critical to Splatoon’s success.
Although, no title urged people to understand the GamePad like September 2015’s Super Mario Maker. How could it not? The most intuitive and playful piece of UGC software ever created, building stages on the Wii U was effortless joy. The controls were so elegant that its successor on Switch — while the better game — felt somewhat rigid by comparison. The stylus and GamePad screen were unbeatable.
But few cared. Super Mario Maker sold just over four million units, nearly two million less than New Super Mario Bros. U, and nearly a million less than Splatoon. The game should’ve been everything; it should’ve turned the corner. Make-a-Mario in the YouTube era should’ve been the golden ticket. But it ended up instead as just the final game to breach the Wii U’s top ten best-selling games list. Not a single title after September 2015 could break in, unable to surpass the tenth best-selling game, Mario Party 10, at 2.2 million units. Not even The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. By the second half of 2015, few cared about the Wii U. Fewer still were interested in the GamePad.
Star Fox Zero represents the peculiar wheel spinning that ran parallel to the clear, boundary-pushing design present elsewhere in the Wii U generation
Often, it felt like Nintendo didn’t either. For all the experiences which worked to establish the GamePad as core to the system’s success, just as many both passively and actively worked to undo it. Star Fox Zero was certainly the face of overt anti-GamePad sentiment. To the crowd which took issue with the system, that 2016 release was a perfect encapsulation of what the controller represented to some — unnecessary innovation shoehorning half-baked ideas into games crushed under their weight. Considering that Star Fox 64 is my favourite game of all time, I was there day one picking up my pre-ordered copy of Zero. I didn’t hate it. I’m certainly not in the overwhelmingly large group who turned their unshackled ire upon the game.
Star Fox Zero represents the peculiar wheel spinning that ran parallel to the clear, boundary-pushing design present elsewhere in the Wii U generation. The game forces you to look away from the TV to the GamePad at arbitrary points solely out of some obligation to use the second screen. 2015’s Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival, perhaps Wii U’s most infamous release, likewise employed totally arbitrary GamePad control. Paper Mario: Color Splash also stuck strange touch battling where it didn’t belong. Some system menus even require use of the GamePad to access. Many choices were made across hardware and software to uncreatively send reminders that the controller existed.
While many Wii U games discovered creative implementations for the GamePad, and another contingent actively seemed hampered by its use, many more were totally uninterested in the controller. But this vast selection of middle-ground titles wasn’t bad. To the contrary, these were often some of the system’s best. Pikmin 3 introduced little to its series but executed upon its existing ideas brilliantly, as did Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Super Mario 3D World is derivative of its 3DS predecessor, but it’s exponentially stronger. Xenoblade Chronicles X is another wonderful example and perhaps the most technically impressive game on the system. It, like Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, and the aforementioned titles all disregard the GamePad. Pikmin 3 is best played with a Wii Remote, and all of the rest just ask you to pick up a Pro Controller. It does the system’s two-screen approach no favours to have the majority of its greatest games disregard the central hardware gimmick.
There was a lack of clear vision within Nintendo during this era. It’s no surprise that the machine failed to resonate, as the library itself struggled to find direction. The Wii U was clearly a gambit to recapture past success — remaining in the familiar Blue Ocean environment that brought Nintendo to the stratosphere one generation prior. But when that failed, when the casual player moved elsewhere, Nintendo had no plan. Nintendo was stuck with a machine impossible to market, its games often at odds with its hardware.
It looked like a system stuck in the previous decade. The name, the reliance on Wii Remotes — Nintendo hoped to create a contiguous experience from Wii to Wii U, retaining a similar vocabulary in the process. Instead, Nintendo created an optical nightmare. The system looked like an add-on for the Wii. Games like Wii Sports Club, Wii Party U, and Wii Fit U didn’t help create a new identity either. Many couldn’t understand whether Wii U was even a new console, let alone appreciate the concept of the two-screen home gameplay experience.
The Wii U was never given a fair shake. But the fault for that lies with Nintendo, who could not clearly market and message the platform
By the time that the Switch began subsuming the Wii U’s lineup, it became harder and harder to see the Wii U as anything other than a first whack at a hybrid design. Chunks of 2017 and 2018’s lineups consisted of myriad Wii U games, eroding what little identity the system had clawed to establish, turning these titles into de facto Switch exclusives. And it worked — not many feel compelled to celebrate the Wii U these days or truly re-engage with it. Why should they, when the lion’s share of Wii U conversation is relegated to listicles querying which remaining games could make the jump to Switch?
The Wii U was never given a fair shake. But the fault for that lies with Nintendo, who could not clearly market and message the platform. It started life looking like a Wii peripheral and it trundled along afraid of its best ideas. There is an alternate universe wherein the platform had a more distinct name, launching with Super Mario Maker, pumping out Nintendo Land, Splatoon, Game & Wario in sequence. Where the games that followed had the same love for the GamePad and none rejected it.
Yet that’s not our reality. I loved my Wii U long after my broken wrist healed. For better, for worse. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health. We had our rough patches — 2016 was not very good. I have a very close relationship with this system, though. How could I not, having gotten it at thirteen? The vast majority of its games are among my very favourites, and I’m telling the truth about HDMI 3. In loving it so closely, though, I only see in it what I came to adore. But maybe what others say about it is more true than I admit. Perhaps the only simple narrative is that the system is a proto-Switch, because the reality is a lot messier. Ultimately, I don’t really mind. I love the Wii U anyway.
