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.
#Wii u release date series
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.
#Wii u release date pro
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.