Everyone or almost knows. In terms of capacity, the Wii is very close to the GameCube. What not everyone knows, however, is that when Nintendo let the public try the Wii for the first time, gamers weren’t actually playing with the new console, but with their big sister.
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Those who have seen or covered E3 2006 will remember it well. One of the phenomena on the California show was the Wii. The queues took several hours to experience the functionality of the console with the controller in hand and play titles like Super Mario Galaxy. But things were not quite as presented by the Kyoto company. For the entire duration of the show, it wasn’t the Wii that visitors to the Nintendo booth could play.
This week’s (re-) discovery was made on Twitter by a “Forest of Illusion“The latter has indeed stated that in a number of tweets When journalists, industry professionals (and tourists who then arrived in the living room) tried out titles like Wii Sports, Super Mario Galaxy or The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii during E3 in 2006, they actually played versions of those titles that ran on modified GameCube .
As in the photos of “Forest of Illusion“and available in our gallery below, The Wiis on the test benches were actually empty grenades that only shone the blue light on the way of the console. In the locked cabinets with “Wii” and screens there were actually GameCubes.
Deceptive appearances
The Wii obviously had its own development kits called NDEV. “”Forest of Illusion“recalls, however, that the latter started arriving in March 2006 and that according to internal reports at that time many of them were initially defective. It would therefore have been difficult to have enough stable kits for this year’s E3 barely two months later.
A message from May 2006 post in the forum NeoGAF Also tells the story of visitors to E3 2006 who crashed their Twilight Princess demo. They were surprised to see that the hostess at the booth had restarted a GameCube hidden in the terminal instead of restarting the exposed Wii (the Wii stayed “on” during the entire restart process).
Nintendo’s stroke of genius was therefore to market a brand new console, with the success we know, when it would also have been possible to make the Wiimote an accessory for GameCube. While we’ll never know, the fate of the “revolutionary” Wii remote on GameCube is likely not the same.
This anecdote reminds us in passing that it’s important not to take what the editors say or show at face value. Especially at trade fairs …
Are you surprised by this information? Would Nintendo have liked to offer the Wiimote and the associated games directly on GameCube? Give us your thoughts in the comments below.
