Switch Close to Passing Sales of N64 (UPDATE: Now Passed!)

Illusion

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Illusion on 12 April 2019

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Well it is true that the N64 sold better than the Wii U. Obviously more people were playing the system. But I never saw a young kid that didn't like the Wii U.

I wasn't going to buy a Wii U, but my daughter begged and begged for one. Her friends didn't get one, but they were always happy to come over and play. Games like Mario Kart and Smash Bros never lost popularity. It should be obvious from the Switch that these are still popular games. But these games, by themselves, were not enough for her friends to get a Wii U. Some of them didn't like the gamepad, but on multiplayer games, you can just use the Wii remote. Likewise my nephew had a Wii U and played it a lot for a couple of years. Then his parents got him an XBox360 (and then a PS4 a couple of years after that). The biggest problem that the Wii U had was lack of games, so my daughter and nephew stopped playing it around 2015-2016, because there was a lack of games. But then again, I believe the N64 had the problem of a small library as well.

I guess that it is a matter of degree. Like you said the N64 had a much larger base (at least in North America) but I guess that you are right that the Wii U would have had the same impact on the lives of many young Nintendo fans who grew up in that era just on a slightly smaller scale. Whether it sold 13 million or 33 million, there are going to be lots of people who had very positive experiences and great memories with either console.

And I want to be clear, I loved the Wii U. It was a far better console than the Wii, in my opinion, and its exclusives were some of the best games of the generation. I have had a lot of fun with mine and I put it on par with the N64 in terms of being a great multiplayer party machine. It is sad that its best games (including BotW) didn't remain as exclusives as I feel that history is going to whitewash the Wii U with the Switch and the Wii U won't get credited with the really amazing gaming experiences that people had with it. It did truly have some brilliant games.