Nintendo’s mid-noughties revolution feels so distant now, even if its impact hasn’t really dimmed. The touch sensation of the DS led in its own way to the iOS revolution, the motion controls of the Wii helped reestablish video games in the living room and push them towards the mainstream, and the reverberations of both are felt to this day. There’s another facet of its revolution that sadly never had the same impact, and now is set to finally fizzle away.
It’s wild to look all those years back at the collection of announcements that led up to the Wii’s reveal – Iwata’s assertion that specs don’t matter so much (these were more innocent times), then the following year the reveal of the console itself, no bigger than a couple of DVDs (this is a thing that people used to watch movies on in the mid-noughties). Even wilder that before we got a proper look at that revolutionary controller the big feature that Nintendo’s bold new console would lean in on would be this little thing called backwards compatibility.
Virtual Console – Launch Trailer (Wii U) Watch on YouTube
20 years of Nintendo games, all available in one place! The concept of the Virtual Console was as dizzying in its own way as the Wii Remote would be, even if the reality of it at launch in November 2006 wasn’t quite so dazzling – there was only something like a dozen titles to choose from, but I think we were all too busy with Wii Bowling to really gripe too much.
Still, over the years it blossomed into something remarkable, and by the time the service made it onto the Wii U it was an absolute treasure trove with MSX, PC Engine and even Nintendo DS games to choose from. I’ll always remember with fondness the Hanabi Festivals that used to generously offer up games that were previously only available within Japan, and they felt an integral part of the appeal of the Wii. And Update Day, of course.