The poor Wii U. That inexplicable console that was simultaneously too confusing to be useful, but too unexceptional to be inspiring. Meaninglessly carrying the weight of the name of the phenomenal success of the Nintendo Wii, it was—by most metrics—a rare miss and a colossal flop. And now you can’t even get it fixed.
Was anyone getting it fixed? Has anyone who owns one tried to turn it on at any point in the last eight years? Either way, Nintendo of Japan has officially declared repairs for the Wii U to be over, because as of July 3, they’ve “run out of parts.”
I mock, but I find it sad. This was the first device to run Breath of the Wild! We talk a lot about game preservation, but there’s little point in that without console preservation alongside it. While almost every major game that was ever worth playing on the Wii U has since been improved and re-released on the Switch, that doesn’t include the many more mediocre games, nor indeed a lot of those released for the eShop. Or Miiverse, or Wii Street U, or any of the many obscurities that accompanied the most obscure of consoles.
I remember the first time I encountered a Wii U—I was in one of those weird game show-adjacent hotel rooms, where a smaller publisher rents a nearby hotel suite (far cheaper than trying to secure floor space in the show itself) and then sets up a bunch of machines to demo their games. There’s the deep strangeness of beds in the room where you’re playing, but it was nothing compared to my complete bemusement at using the as-yet unreleased Wii U, and not having the faintest idea where I was supposed to be looking, and how I was expected to use a controller with a screen on it to play a game on another screen over there.
Read More: In The Year 2023, One New Wii U Was Sold
I think there’s a universe where the Wii U could have worked, if it had only been a little bit weirder, and not released with almost the same name as the biggest breakthrough casual gaming device of all time. Now we have a universe where if your individual Wii U doesn’t work, it likely never will again.
As you can see in the embedded tweet above, Nintendo made clear this day was coming in May of 2023, saying the company would continue to repair the machine until it ran out of bits. Bits is has now run out of, following the official ending of all online services earlier this year. And yes, it’s arguable there wasn’t perhaps enormous demand, given that a grand total of one Wii U was sold in the U.S. last year, and it sold pretty dreadfully at its peak—but it’s still sad to see any era end. Preserve your Wii U in amber, immediately.
Fortunately, I don’t know if you heard, but the following console, the Nintendo Switch, proved rather popular.
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