20 years of the Nintendo Wii

Nintendo seems like an unstoppable, inevitable juggernaut in 2026. The Switch is one of the best-selling consoles ever, behind only Sony’s Playstation 2 and therefore ahead of every other major success in Nintendo’s own history. The Switch 2 is off to a tremendous start, both in terms of the quality of the games on the fledgling console, its own features, and how many people have already been willing to jump on that train. This is a very different feeling from how things were for Nintendo and its future just 20 years ago, when the Wii was on the eve of its release.This is a very lightning round version of history, but the stage has to be set just a little bit. Nintendo was the clear winner of the 8-bit era with the Nintendo Entertainment System; there was no actual competition, even if there were other consoles on the market. Nintendo had a stranglehold both on consumers and game publishers, thanks to exclusivity demands required to be able to release games on the console at all, and…