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The launch happened in, of course, November 2012.
And I mean, we were talking about how we had this like we had the sense of dread about the Wii U.
And I knew something was wrong when like I want to preorder the Wii U, Amazon .com.
OK, in my cart and done.
Something is wrong here.
When you can successfully buy a piece of hardware.
Yes. Yes, Krista. If a console is available, there's something wrong.
Either you're being sold like a brick in a box or it's not going to be popular.
of there because i think even as of this recording i still see on twitter like oh there's a lottery to buy a ps5 today get in line everybody i mean i know it's because of supply chain issues but before the wii u it took me 18 months to get a wii i did not play the wii myself in my own home until uh like february of 2008 or something crazy like that yeah i was not used to just being able to order a console and you still can't do that today yeah yeah the launch numbers wise i don't remember the exact number but it was okay you know that first weekend or a week or so but it fell off really fast and that's
obviously not what we had expected i remember we had spent a lot of time before talking about well we got to send these systems out to media so how many can we get and who can we send them out to and we were really strictly limited it's like no this thing is going to sell out we need every single unit we can get out on the shelves because people are going to want to buy this thing and uh may have miscalculated on that a little bit just a bit yeah and i was looking over the launch uh titles for this and i was like oh you know these games are all pretty good uh there's some you know you play if you
played arkham city sure but here it is again if you want to try it and there's like contemporary releases like assassin's creed 3 is available and it's out on other systems too so not not uh not a terrible launch but also uh the games people wanted to play would not actually be out until fall of 2013.
Things like Pikmin 3, Super Mario 3D World, and for some people, Wii Fit U.
That was one of the big things that they were promising.
I don't know if that was a successful title or not, as much as Wii Fit, but that was a thing that was on the horizon, but not ready for launch. And I really feel like, oh god, if Mario 3D World would have been available, that would have been great.
But we had to wait almost a year for that.
The launch was also where we started to learn, you know, in the the lead up to that of like oh this this console may be not ready to be released it may be a little half -baked we would hear okay so everybody's gonna have to do a significant day one patch that depending on your internet speed could take you over an hour to download so hey PR team figure out a way to message that and make that sound good oh great and you know we were getting our hands on final units like why does this thing take like a minute to boot up or why does it take a minute to you know open up the e -shop or any application at all
so again that that sense of dread just started to grow as you got your hand on the final thing and i was like this i don't think this is ready yeah i felt that the wii u had its own bottleneck when it came to downloading things despite what your speed was uh things always took much longer to download on the wii u and i know that for a fact especially now that the store was closing this year and i was buying a lot of things and downloading them and just leaving my system on overnight to download i don't know like a six gig game i think you're being very generous with your comment about the good
launch titles because i remember the launch titles being real trashy and i i think there's two games that really stuck out to me one probably because i was just traumatized by them one is zombie you which i like zombie you no no okay to each their own to each their own but i I just remember real terrible, like, hamming it up type demos.
Poor Reggie had to really kind of, you know, be a used car salesman a little bit on some of those games.
So that one for sure was just a bit of a head scratcher for me.
And then the other one that truly, truly traumatized me was Sing Party.
Not sure if you guys remember that.
I remember that. I remember going on a Wii U launch, like, five -city tour.
We brought, you know, demos to all these different markets, and we were on these big long press tours showing Wii U in that launch period.
And basically we just had to, like, karaoke, sing party.
And it was, I think I sang Call Me Maybe like 2 ,000 -plus times, And I really wanted to like jump out the window.
I was like, I can't, I can't do this anymore.
And it was, it was really rough.
And it was, that was the moment I realized, I'm like, yeah, but this is not, we don't have like a Nintendo quality, Nintendo level game at launch. Like we have this almost feels like shovelware kind of stuff that we're using to launch the system.
Something is definitely not right with this, you know.
And Bob, you mentioned the third party games and there was sort of a fatal flaw with those where on paper it sounded great it's like hey we got batman we got mass effect we got madden but anybody who had wanted to play those games had already done so you know months and months ago when those first came out on other systems so there just wasn't a lot of interest and there really wasn't much new or exclusive content to make people want to do those again and i think that really hurt a lot of those partnerships where the publishers would be like hey our big launch games tanked why you know why should we
really invest in the system long term and you saw like ea you know it was pretty quick to just bail out because of that i don't think that's a particularly fair way to assess um you know based on the software that they were putting out but i think that's how a lot of them read the room yeah i guess i was being a bit charitable i mean without the context of the market it's a good launch uh window but uh krista is right in that that there was no really title you had to have i mean uh new super mario brothers you uh is a well -made game i don't like it uh what do you do with the wii u you blow on the gamepad
basically or you touch the gamepad a few times to do things in it and i think i mean some retronauts host really like that game i disagree but uh for me and also the title is awful the title of that game is terrible i have problems saying new super mario brothers you just name it something else name it like mario wii u fun party or something nintendo classic nintendo naming though that is yes absolutely always they do that so and it and also it had the unfortunate thing of like it came out i feel like three months after new super mario brothers 2 on the 3ds so it was like it was just a glut of stuff
on the system at the time it really felt like i was feeling new super mario Brothers doubt but yes uh in reference to what I said at the start of the episode uh when it was the pre -release for the uh Wii U I got to go to two days straight a uh Nintendo press event where you could play the Wii U all day uh and I I believe you guys were both there and uh yeah for eight hours straight and I was there capturing the whole thing like all right I'm gonna play a new super mario brothers u i'm gonna get the credits and i did get to the credits and i i asked if i was the first person to get to the credit
roll of outside of nintendo and the people there said i was or at least as far as they knew but i was definitely the first person in our group to to beat the game you should have gotten some sort of sash or bed yeah i should have yeah but a special brownie perhaps but uh but i i thought it was a it was my favorite of the new mario games i played it was the one that played the most like you know a real mario game when i played it in solo mode uh but uh but yeah i mean compare it to a year later with 3d world like there's no comparison like that is a way way better game that really showed off what the system
uh could do and now mario maker one and two those are basically like infinite 2d mario games so it It kind of made the new Super Mario Bros.
U, I said it again, irrelevant for the most part.
But again, a very well -made game, not something you want to pin a console launch to.
Just saying the name of the game destroyed my speech. I don't remember.
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