You can’t think about the Wii Shop Channel without first conjuring up its music – that irresistible ditty composed by Kazumi Totaka, a song so infectious it went on to become a meme. And where to start with that? The remixes of Earth, Wind and Fire’s September, the brilliant mash-up of Drake’s Hotline Bling, or why not a full-blown jazz cover? What a tune; this was background muzak elevated to the anthemic.
We shop in silence now, and there’s something slightly mournful about that. When the Wii Shop closes in the next few hours, we lose more than a place to pick up games for that aging console; we lose a little slice of what once made Nintendo so magical, where fun was baked into the experience at system level. It might just be a chintzy tune, but it’s part of a broader philosophy that forms an entire identity; part of that same school of design that gave us the Miiverse, Pictochat and, looking further afield, Apple’s breathing light indicator, whereby sleeping Macbooks mimic the breathing rhythm of a sleeping human. It’s those little things that make these strange lumps of plastic and the code they run so lovable.
Satoru Iwata was an Apple nerd, of course, and the Wii perhaps feels like Iwata’s console more than any other in Nintendo’s history. It felt like his revolution, and during those initial unveils he was front and centre, first when it was met with some apathy in May 2005 and later, when the controller was unveiled that September, with bewilderment.
Source: Eurogamer The Wii Shop Channel's closure marks the death of a piece of Nintendo magic