Second Screen
New Year’s Eve felt like it needed something, some gathering point. That was the whole idea behind the Wii—make gaming a thing you did with other people in the room. The Wii U kept that dream but complicated it with the GamePad, a screen right there in your hands while everyone else stared at the TV. You could be looking at something nobody else could see. Hidden information. A separate world. For a designer, that’s genuinely interesting—asymmetrical play, where the rules shift depending on who you are and what you’re holding.
Nintendo invented that constraint and then mostly didn’t know what to do with it. Most games ignored the potential entirely. The few that did use it well were solid, though. Super Mario 3D World came out near the end, when the Wii U was already clearly failing, and it was good in a way that had nothing to do with the gimmick. Just tight level design and clever platforming. You didn’t need the GamePad. It just worked.
I look back on the Wii U now with something like affection, which feels weird because it was a commercial disaster. But there’s something about hardware that tries something real, even if it fails. The tablet was awkward, the library was thin, the whole console felt pulled in a dozen directions at once. But someone pitched it, and someone green-lit it, and for a moment the industry could have gone a different way. It didn’t, but the possibility was there.