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The Wii is one of the best consoles of all time. It& #39;s also had one of the most interesting development histories for such a console. (thread)
It all started in 2004 when a worker at Nintendo, Shitaku Futushita said "I DEMAND A REVOLUTION!" (In Japanese of course). He was known at Nintendo& #39;s offices for randomly making outbursts.
Futushita was sick of the GameCube and wanted a new experience. Something that would connect console to console, from the United States to Korea.
It turns out that Futushita wasn& #39;t the only one at Nintendo who was thinking about new hardware and a successor to the GameCube. A few days later, he stormed into a meeting with some Nintendo employees about their next console.
At the time, they didn& #39;t have a codename for the system, it was called the "New Nintendo GameCube", aka "NNGC".
Futushita yelled "I DEMAND A REVOLUTION!" like he did a few days prior. "Revolution", the developers said with their jaws halfway open. "That& #39;s it! We need a revolution in our video game business!"
And so the new codename for this top secret console was now "Revolution", aka "RVL" (this was written in English).
At the time, most Nintendo employees didn& #39;t know this new system was being developed. Over the next couple weeks, some of the Nintendo employees had plenty of meetings planning out what they wanted to do with their high-tech console that they were making.
A lot of these meetings had many batches of chocolate chip cookies with a pitcher of cold milk, and this was the key to success planning this console out. (I didn& #39;t know that Japan liked cookies and milk the way we do in the US.)
Soon over time, more and more Nintendo employees heard about this rumor and how wild it was. One employee suggested that the Revolution can be a home a hamster can live in (Yes, a hamster inside the Revolution’s shell, with the casing being transparent of course).
The guy who suggested that was later fired. Someone suggested that there be these "twin" controllers like the Nintendo Switch had, so there would be these detachable controllers that can be attached to a plastic grip.
Another idea was to have the Revolution let you connect a Revolution-branded phone to use with it and do "cool stuff" (no idea what cool stuff they& #39;re talking about but they said that in the actual patent documents, which is weird.
In 2005, an email was sent put to all of Nintendo& #39;s employees including ones that worked at Nintendo of Europe and Nintendo of America. The email said that the console was now under development. It also called for a backyard cookout that following Saturday, but only in Japan.
There was plenty of steak, shrimp, hamburgers, and hot dogs there (yes, Japanese people eat hot dogs). And if you were vegetarian, you could eat tofu. The point of this cookout was to generate excitement for working on the console.
Meanwhile, people in the United States were making rumors about Nintendo making a new console, however it was unbeknownst to them that Nintendo was making their console, the Revolution.
Seeing that the DS was the name for their newest handheld system, and the first letter of Roger’s name is the letter R, they said that the next console by Nintendo would be named the Nintendo RS.
People started making fake leaks of what games would come out for the system, and of course what the menu would look like. Many of the fake leaks were made in MS Paint and then were sent to the press.
During E3 2005, Satoru Iwata announced the codename for the system - the Revolution. He said it would have 244p video output, 32 kbps sound, and 2 MB of RAM. Many gamers were underwhelmed by the news and Nintendo’s stock dropped a significant enough amount.
A Brazillian Nintendo news website known as “Encanador Nintendo” was talking about the Revolution and reached out to the company to try to phish them (in English) because of the news. The plan failed and the news reporter was jailed for a little while.
A month later, people were making a lot more fake information about the Revolution and said that it come with a game called “Revolution Unite!” which is a game where Pong met Metroid and Bomberman.
This was actually a game that Nintendo was developing. It would later be planned to release as a $10 game on the Revolution Shop Channel.
Futushita was still kind of annoyed by the path Nintendo was taking on this new console. He successfully persuaded some of the staff to include motion controls into the console. Before they knew it, they had a sort of flimsy system working for motion controls.
They had a company named AiLive (founded by a Chinese guy) make some software for motion controls so developers could take advantage of the motion controls.
On September 9, 2005, Nintendo announced that the console they were working on would be named the Wii. The reason for naming the console that was as random as how they named the DS system. (It doesn& #39;t stand for DualScreen as most people think, it stands for Developer& #39;s System).
The reason it was named the Wii was because of an inside joke in Japan& #39;s headquarters involving a bathroom that was always closed, unless you had the janitor& #39;s key to get into it.
The bathroom was rumored to be very nice and clean, with only one of the toilet handles to flush being broken. Of course, no one knew what the real experience of that bathroom was because only a very small number of employess had a key to get inside the bathroom.
They weren& #39;t supposed to have access to it either. The reason they wanted to use that bathroom was because of how dirty the other ones were.
Also announced on that day was a game called "Super Walnut Crackers". It was gonna be released on discs sold at shops.
The gameplay involves you working at a factory that processes nuts, specifically walnuts, and you have to rhythmically crack walnuts to meet constantly changing standards.
The game was to be released at launch. Another one was a sequel to Ice Climbers called "Fire Climbers". Fans were excited that the classic NES game could finally have a sequel.
Meanwhile, a company called BroadOn that worked with AiLive was working on developing all sorts of things for the Wii - the Wii Shop Channel, the middleware to power games, and overall security of the console.
The workers did not care about the security of the console, and as most of them grew up with things such as the Game Genie on their NES, they wanted to give a chance for homebrew to be possible on the system.
Their boss was very lazy and didn& #39;t care what his employees were doing, so they proceeded to carelessly write code for the so-called security module.
The Wii Shop Channel development was going great, but that& #39;s if you followed BroadOn& #39;s unusual choice of content delivery, JavaScript implementations, and backend code. What looked simple and beautiful on the Wii was a trainwreck when you looked at the backend.
Nintendo trusted the people at BroadOn and didn& #39;t see what they did with the code until it was too late. If they saw it earlier, they would have got mad at the employees and would do something about it.
Fortunately for BroadOn and the future Homebrew community, this is the state things were in when the Wii was released, of course they could push changes to the server but they were unable to with the nature of their setup.
However, BroadOn& #39;s leniency towards people who potentially wanted to mod their Wii allowed future exploits to happen with the Wii, but not with BroadOn.
