You know when a plane in a movie falls into an irrecoverable dive, the rocks rising up to meet it, the collision inevitable, the pilot’s eyes locked wide open – but then, somehow, it pulls up at the last second? For you that image might call to mind Goldeneye; for me, a person so British as to make parody impossible, it’s Wallace and Gromit. The point is, it’s the same satisfying trajectory Nintendo fans have witnessed in the two years since the Switch came out.
The extraordinary success of the Switch has been all the more exhilarating for the downward momentum Nintendo had accrued during the Wii U years. For a single company to be responsible for both a console cycle’s most disastrous machinery failure and its soaring surprise recovery? It’s nothing less than the stuff of cinema, if movies were made about game company financials. And in a world where The Big Short wins an Oscar, maybe they will. But the truth is more complex. In fact, everything that has made the Switch the console of a generation was birthed, rather clumsily, by its predecessor.
Source: IGN.com Everything You Love About the Switch, the Wii U Did First