The Wii U generation left us with many unknowns. And, knowing the secrecy with which Nintendo usually treats its products and franchises, many will never leave the company. However, there is a Wii U feature that was announced before it was released that was never implemented. In a recent interview, Reggie Fils-Aimé, former president of Nintendo of America, has resolved the dilemma once and for all.
What happened to multiplayer on Wii U?
It has been 11 years since the Nintendo Wii U was introduced at E3. And, it seems incredible that Nintendo had in its hands one of the biggest failures in its history and that they did not realize it until years later. The Wii U presentation was poorly crafted. It was confusing, and this error marked the entire generation of this first attempt at a hybrid console. By focusing on the gamepad and not showing the machine, viewers thought the Wii U was just a controller. In fact, even many media came to fall that the Wii U was nothing more than a control with a screen for the Wii of a lifetime.
But even those who got the concept right would end up being disappointed by the Wii U. One of the first questions that fans asked Nintendo was if this new gamepad was going to be able to be used in multiplayer mode . That is, if with two of these controllers we were going to be able to play on a single screen. Nintendo said yes, but this feature was never implemented .
13 million consoles sold? It was not worth implementing
According to Reggie, Wii U had a whole very interesting development plan that we probably didn’t get to see half of. Technically, the console was capable of communicating with multiple gamepads at the same time . However, Reggie Fils-Aimé says this was never released due to low console adoption . With these words, we assume that the possibility existed, but it required a lot of work to materialize it. And, given low sales, Nintendo decided to discard it.
In the same interview, Reggie defends his position by saying that Nintendo never made a game that needed another screen controller to maximize the experience. However, here we disagree. Without going any further, Mario Kart 8 itself could have benefited significantly from this feature. However, we had to wait for it to arrive on Nintendo Switch to be able to play this mode.
According to the former president of Nintendo of America, for a system to be able to squeeze all its capabilities, the user base must be broad. The developers had such low expectations for the Wii U that they never considered playing with two Wii U controllers at the same time. This, added to the short life that the console had, was the perfect storm. Luckily, Nintendo Switch is being just what Nintendo dreamed of with Wii U. However, we will never know what would have happened if the Big N had known how to convey well to the public what that generation was about and how far they could have taken this hardware.