Hello viewer, you know, asking for help isn't easy, is it? I know that for a fact, I've been that way pretty much my whole life. But if I'm gonna do YouTube full-time to the best of my ability, I gotta learn to ask for help, and luckily you guys helped convince me to ask a sponsor, and Filmora was happy enough to oblige. They make budget video editing software that's really easy to use, and I can say that because I've actually used it, it's my life. The thing about it, is it resembles professional software so much that I could literally install it, and use it immediately. But you don't have to take my word for it, you can download it yourself for a free trial that requires no signup or anything like that, just install and use. And not only that, they're also giving away an iPhone 11 as part of their Vlogmas giveaway. You make a small video and you can be in turn to win one of them. It's really nice, check the link in the description if you're interested. Great. Thank you for being patient. On to the episode. *intro* *bells ringing* *whispering*
Hey, hey, guess what, Merry Christmas! *music* It's a good time of year, the time of year we put up the Christmas tree, get out the festive hats, and drink lots of original premium quality Jingle Juice. So for this episode, I thought we would talk about the most Christmassy thing I know of. It's the launch of the Nintendo Wii. Remember waking up on Christmas morning, if you were fortunate enough to get one, that is, and then you boot up that Wii Sports disc and everyone gathers around as a family and plays baseball and golf, and all that? *sigh* Who know, I'd still be playing it like 6 years from now. (offscreen) It's been 15 (years.) What? While on today's holiday themed episode of Beta64,
we're gonna be looking at the Nintendo Wii... ...Menu, as well as many of the launch channels that came with it, along with the Miis. Plus, there's a ton of scrap features for the system,
and not to mention the infamous lost startup disk that even today still has yet to be found.
So what, do you stay. Let's get this all started! The revolution has begun. (commercial)
"Wii would like to play." With the Wii's hardware decided on the controller, created and ready to be finalized, all that was left was to begin creating the Wii's operating system or, as Nintendo calls it, the Wii's IPL or initial program loader,
or as we like to call it the Wii Menu, *startup jingle*
which began to take shape in October of 2005, when the development of WiiConnect24 was just about finished, and it was time to discuss the system's functions. Technically though, it had been talked about before,
but just in passing, with each division discussing it on their own, with no real unity. So nothing was really happening to move it forward. So in order to get things moving, a major meeting was called to make the Wii Menu an official company project. But of course, at this point, it wasn't called the Wii Menu, with all these channels and clean UI, those ideas hadn't even been considered yet. In fact, there weren't really that many ideas at all,
other than the fact that they wanted to make the system stay on at all times, with a nice little sleep mode to save power. So, now what?
What do we have to make the Wii do to justify it staying on all time? Well, luckily, someone had an idea, and that person was Kenichiro Ashida, who's referred to in the Iwata Asks interview as Tamakisan. He's known for being in charge of the Wii Menus, WiiConnect24 as well as a bunch of other system functions, and he had some pretty good ideas. It all started when Tamaki first joined Nintendo with the idea of making games that could cross the generational gap. Games that a grandmother and her granddaughter could play and have fun together. Mostly though, he was just lonely and wanted a connection. He mentioned in an interview that playing games had begun to feel, just like he was being cut off from the world around him. So, since he had such an important role within the development of the Wii's IPL, he felt this was a good chance to bring that vision to life. A vision of the Wii Remote being a commonplace item on every family's coffee table, to pick up and play whenever and, since the Wii was going to as they put it "never sleep", the idea soon came about to offer services, one that would be useful or just plain fun for the entire family. And so they got to work, starting from scratch, since this was a pretty new-ish concept for consoles at the time. They had made something similar for the DS, where you could use a clock or do Pictochat without any additional software, But still, at the time, the most common thing to include with a console was just a CD or a DVD player. Not a food ordering channel, like the Wii got in Japan.
At the beginning though, they weren't called channels. In fact, there weren't even multiple services at first. The team was attempting to get all of their ideas into one piece of software for the Wii, but they just couldn't get it to all fit together. So in the interest of appealing to the whole family, they decided to include them all, just as separate applications. But then a new issue came to light.
How do we present all of these services? After all, you don't want to overwhelm the user with a ton of options thrown right in their faces they boot up the console. It needs to be easily digestible. Someone on the team had the idea of lining them all up like TVs in an electronic store, but the idea didn't particularly stick, so they kept on thinking, and thinking, to the point where they felt like it was a dead end. That is, until someone started lining them all up in rows, just to see what came to mind.
And that's when someone blurted out, "These look kind of like, TV channels." *realization* That was it, channels! A row of TVs on different channels! And the idea quickly took root, and those who didn't quite like it, well, Tamaki convinced them one way or another, with a passionate speech saying "What an amazing idea having a console for everyone is!" From that point on, it was smooth sailing. There were some other suggestions that didn't quite make it in, like having the Disc Channel be a bigger channel, since it's obviously going to be used the most, but they decided to having all channels be equal sized, that was really part of the core idea of the system, since they wanted every channel to be equal, so they left it as is. So now that we've gotten the channels, let's look at some specific ones, and see how they were developed, starting with my favorite, the Wii Shop Channel. I just remember booting up the Wii Shop Channel every so often, just to see what new games they added, maybe some demos, maybe some, some freebies because you know, I didn't have money. I wasn't gonna buy anything, but you know, maybe I should. It's never too late. "Note: The Wii Shop Channel was discontinued in January 30, 2018. Maybe you shoud've been early, Andrew?" Ah, the Wii Shop Channel, or as it was originally called in development, the Shopping Channel. It was a place designed by Nintendo to sell retro games, known even early on as Virtual Console. Simply pick your game, spend some Wii Points, and there you go. You've got a classic game right on the Wii Menu with its own personal channel. But that wasn't the way it was originally going to be. At first, there was simply going to be a Virtual Console channel that when you launch it, would list out all the games you've purchased, sorted by console. But after a short time, they decided to scrap this idea, simply because it took too long to play a game. But having individual channels for each game, you can get to them fast quickly and easy, and even sort them how you like, since they all come with these big channel icons that'll make it easy to find what you're looking for. The Virtual Console wasn't the only thing on Nintendo's mind while developing the Shopping Channel though. They were also toying around with the idea of selling Wii-dedicated software through it, ones that were created by smaller developers since sold directly by Nintendo. This was later known as WiiWare, and was specifically designed to open the door to smaller developers so they could sell their games to a wide audience with little worry about upfront costs, since Nintendo would handle the game's distribution. There was also a plan that if a WiiWare game sold well enough, it would be repackaged by Nintendo in disc form to be sold at retail. But Nintendo didn't really do a whole lot with that idea. The only game I remembered into Nintendo giving that treatment to was Tetris Party Deluxe in 2010, though only the Australian version was actually published by Nintendo. Bit Trip Complete also got a retail release in 2011. But that was published by Access Games, not Nintendo. And let's not forget TV Show King Party in 2008, or as I like to call it, Ubisoft's attempt at making their own bootleg Buds. This guy looks like he's in pain though. Alright, next up is the Mii Channel. I can't even tell you how many hours I put into this place, just making random Miis of family members Maybe some cartoon characters, and Jesus, because I'm a good Christian boy. Turns out though. It didn't start out on the Wii, these avatars made their way onto the Famicom Disk System first, thanks to a tech demo made by Miyamoto and his team. So why don't we take a look at that, now. So, this is it, the start of the Miis, more or less. It's an unreleased game that was shown off years later at GBC 2007, where the player could draw their own face on an avatar, and even animate it using the scenario disk that the game came with. Cool idea right? Well, there was a problem. The higher-ups didn't really see this as much of a game, as it was more of a tool for artists, and since they were strictly in the business of making games, it was pretty obvious they weren't a fan of this, so production stopped, and the game eventually fell away. It wasn't until the Nintendo 64 that things really started picking up again, with the announcement of the Nintendo 64 disk drive in 1997, and the release of Mario Artists Talent Studio in the year 2000. As you can see, once again, it's all about creating our own avatars and animating them, and you can make some pretty interesting ones with different outfits, costumes, hair. And if you utilize the capture cassette or the Game Boy Camera, with a transfer pack, you can even put a picture of your own face onto the avatar itself. Needless to say though, These don't look like Miis, they're too realistic, I guess in a way...? But here's the thing though, technically, Miis aren't the direct descendant of these avatars. Turns out, that was an unreleased GameCube game called Stage Debut, which was shown off at E3 2003. The way it works is that you connect it to your Game Boy Advance to the GameCube using a link cable, and then you can import photos taken of you and your friends with the unreleased Game Eye, which you can see here, thanks to a show floor demo. With these photos in hand, you could paste them on an avatar and have them in the game to, I don't know, dance, go to class with Mario and Pikmin and, if you had the E-Reader cards, Animal Crossing characters...? Yeah, so once again, the higher-ups didn't see how this really work as a game, and Miyamoto couldn't really refute what they were saying, so the idea was put on hold, once again. Then, one fateful day Iwata came up to Miyamoto and said, (Andrew, as Iwata)
"Hey, you uh, remember that avatar thing that you've been making for the past 20 years? Well, small team over in the DS department is making something just like that, and people actually love it." So Miyamoto said to his team, (Andrew, as Miyamoto)
"You guys are useless!" *laughter* And then, he politely said, (Andrew, as Miyamoto)
"Screw this, I'm switching development teams!" And for a few months, he worked over with the DS team on their prototype avatars that looked a lot more like the Miis than the previous ones we've seen. Later on, Nogami, known for his work on Animal Crossing, later Splatoon, was also approached by Iwata and he was so impressed with the work the DS team had done, that he had explained it had to become a Wii game, three games to be exact at least. At least, that was the plan, until was decided seemingly out of the blue to make these Miis a Wii system function, that could be used in a variety of games. This happened pretty far into the development of the Wii, so this new Mii Channel had to be rushed so it can be finished in time for the Wii's launch. They had two months. Yeah, two months, to get this all set up for Wii Sports the first game planned to utilize Miis. And as you probably can expect, those two months were met with a lot of work, specifically trying to make Mii faces not look all Japanese. The developers really had to buckle down and study Facial features from around the world, just to make sure they can include options that could fit, pretty much everyone. After all, the Wii was going to be sold around the world, and they needed people to feel comfortable making their own faces with the tools that they had. It was kind of an arbitrary goal to do this though, since they didn't really have a good gauge to tell when they finally covered everyone. But they did eventually reach a point where they considered it done. It was when Nintendo of Europe was given the Mii software, and managed to make a meal that resembled their boss so well, that he actually got angry at them. And that's when the Mii team could finally sit back and say "We did it." Now, of course, as you would probably expect, Miis had a different look during development. As you can see here, they looked a lot more like Japanese kokeshi dolls, even more so than what they eventually became. But really, that's more of a Wii Sports development story, since the face is technically the only part of a Mii. Any game that chooses to include Miis has the freedom to make the body however they want, within reason. And these kokeshi dolls were just an early version of how Wii Sports handled it. You know, the Mii Channel wasn't the only one being made close to the end of the Wii's development. They all were. The Photo Channel, the News Channel, the Forecast Channel, they were all being made last minute, in order to meet the deadline. Well, except for one. And that one happens to be the Photo Channel, the place where you went to do this, and never use it again. So back to the Photo Channel. Turns out, this was the fastest channel to be completed, thanks to Kawamoto and his previous work on Talents Studio. He used the knowledge he learned from creating the game's visual effects to speed up the process, but really, it was his own desire to see his kids photos on the TV that pushed him to quickly make a prototype of this channel, which turned out to be so good, that they basically called it finished in the prototype phase, except for a few additional features, like drawing on photos, and playing videos. After that, next was the Forecast and News Channel, which were both shown off before release at a Nintendo press conference in September of 2006. Turns out, they both have different icons than what they were given for a final release. Especially the Forecast Channel, which has an even earlier version too, with a different Sun. Not to mention the entire UI of the channel looks different too, a lot less blue. Both the Forecast and News Channel were meant to show off that the Wii was more than just a game console. It was designed as a system for everyday use, it was important. No, it was imperative, that those channels make it by release to solidify this idea. And they did not. They did not make it in time. See, the first Wiis that were sold on launch day, ran on system menu version 1.0. Which included the Disc Channel, Mii Channel and Photo Channel. And while technically, it also included icons for the Wii Shop Channel, Forecast Channel and News Channel, you couldn't launch them. In fact, there wasn't even any data on the system for them, it was just the icons. In order to actually get the data and use them, you had to update first, and that update wasn't pushed out on day one. The Forecast Channel released a month after the launch of the system with version 2.0 Revision 3 update, and the News Channel was added in more than a month after that with the version 2.1 Revision 2 update. And speaking of system menu versions, there's one that happens to be earlier than version 1.0, a pre-release version. And it appeared on some of the earliest store demo kiosks. You can tell us this pre-release system menu version, because it actually doesn't have a menu. Instead on boot, the store worker will be asked to insert a startup disk into the Wii, which was also given by Nintendo with the console. After inserting it, that Wii would install the needed firmware upgrade that was on the disk, and then we're all set. It's a normal week, cool. But here's the thing, some of these early Wiis that required the startup disk to be usable were sold to the public as normal Wiis. At some launch dates, Wii's even had it listed on their box, saying that it included a Wii startup disk instead of Wii Sports. However, we can't really confirm that these boxes actually contain the startup disk since no one has managed to prove that they actually owned the disc, and it's never been found. So, at this point, it still remains a mystery. But even if the startup disk was never found, the Wiis themselves that required the discs is well documented. It's even mentioned by Nintendo themselves on their Wii support page, where it listed as an operating system, problem that needs to be repaired. Sneaky, Nintendo. Calling it an operating system problem. They actually just wanted the Wiis gone. And were willing to give the person a new Wii in return or at least used their startup disk to get it working again, and because of this, the few consoles that actually were released to the public with that pre-release firmware? Yeah, they were given to Nintendo and thought to be lost. That is until one day when a member of Assembler Games found one of these Wiis on eBay listed as broken, and thanks to that, we can now see exactly what that Quote-unquote system menu would have looked like and also what the startup disk may have looked like as well. Of course, though, we don't have the actual disc to double-check this, but you know, there is something about this disc that we do know for sure, it's ID. How do we know this? Well, it's an interesting story. Before the discovery of this quote-unquote broken Wii, it had been known for a while that for some reason, all Wiis would refuse to boot any disc with the ID: "RAAE" and no one knew why, or what that disc was. Turns out though, that was the Wii startup disc ID, as a user by the name of "bushing" on HackMii was allowed to use the broken Wii that was found on eBay, and the only disc it would boot was one with the ID: "RAAE" The whole process they went through is super interesting. So if you want to read more on that, check out the link in the sources in the description. You know, I think this is a good point to talk about the Wii Menu itself, specifically the messaging system. I have so many fond memories of this. We used to send messages to our friends, me and my brother, we'd send little Wii Mails from Mario Galaxy with pictures of our achievements, set up times for Wii Speak, I was almost so excited to see the Wii light up, because I meant there was a new message for my friends. There's no joke here. It's just a really fun memory. The Wii Message Boards idea first came from Animal Crossing actually, it's bulletin board specifically. In fact, the text was even going to be input using the same keyboard from Animal Crossing. Not the Wii one, the funky Gamecube one, and the board itself was even going to have the same wood grain style to it, with messages held on by pins. But eventually, they decided to make it look like the rest of the system with a simple white background with letters on it. But don't get me wrong. It wasn't designed to be a letter exchange service. In fact, the team deliberately made sure to never mention the word "mail" in the whole system, which didn't work. Because a lot of people, including myself, dubbed the service Wii Mail. But from the beginning, it wasn't meant to be just another email service, it's purpose was to be a more relaxed form of communication, a place where you can post memos for the family. Maybe create a diary, send a gameplay photo to a friend, and get stats in the game you played that day, which actually came about, because of a rather interesting request, straight from the president of Nintendo. In short, Iwata wanted moms to like the Wii. He was concerned that parents would be afraid of their child playing too many games on the Wii for too long. So he suggested that the console just you know, turn off, after a certain time set by parental controls. This wasn't a suggestion though. This was an order, that they had to test out this idea and figure out if it was possible to at any point, save all the data for a game and then immediately shut off the console until the next day. And can you believe it? This order was met with a lot of pushback and heated debates within the company, people kept coming to Iwata saying it would be technically impossible or at the very least, way too much work to get the idea to function correctly by release. So the team tried to find another way to fix this problem, something that would convince Iwata to go with their idea, instead of just shutting off the whole system. And the solution they came up with, was play history, where each day you would get a list of games played and for how long. And in order to keep kids from messing with this data, they made it and the letter on the message board unable to be modified or deleted. Some way parents, if they so choose, can check what was played for how long, and then maybe sit down with their kid if they needed to? After pitching the idea to Iwata he decided that,
"Yeah, you know, this really is a much better solution." It also had the bonus of not only being used for parenting, but also for just the ability to see what you've been up to on any specific day. See me, I played Action Girls Racing for 19 hours and the Forecast Channel for seven and a half. *yes apparently he's apparently too addicted in playing the forecast channel and checking what the weather conditions are today* One of the other big ideas for the Wii messaging board, was the ability to get notices from games even when you're not playing them. Tamaki gave a specific example of this with "Animal Crossing for the Wii" later known as "City Folk". He mentioned that the game would be able to post reminders to a player's message board saying things like, "There will be a concert next Saturday in town." Which actually, never came to be, surprisingly. Sure, in City Folk, You could send messages to friends utilizing the Wii Message Board But you never got announcements from the game there. If you wanted those, you would have to boot up the game and check out the in-game bulletin board. You aren't notified of events anywhere else. Oh well. Another example he gave was Brain Age for the Wii, and how after a test, it would be able to send you your brain age to the message board, just as a fun reminder to see what you did that day. Wait, there was no Brain Age for the Wii. All right, well, what other examples of the message boards functionality did it give that didn't actually end up happening? Okay, so, apparently there was also a plan to allow you to notify your friends in your address book that you just purchased a game which never happened as well. Oh, and it looks like the Wii messaging service was originally meant to be a channel too. It was later made to be part of the Wii Menu because they wanted to be something that could be pulled up quickly and easily. And by putting it behind the menu, they could show the users that it was a behind the scenes function that would always be running and checking for messages. Now, believe it or not, there's some actual unused stuff in the Wii Menu itself. Things like unused graphics, text and even some functionality that's been cleverly hidden away and some things are not so cleverly hidden. And take this for example, It's an unused graphic that was meant to show up on the message board. But here's the thing, If you go to Nintendo's UK website on their support page for reading messages and memos, it's right there. It even says Animal Crossing on it or I guess, it's just Animal, but what else could it be besides Animal Crossing? Perhaps, this was the removed functionality in City Folk where it would alert you of upcoming events on the message board. It even shows up in early Wii manuals before it was removed from later Wiis. From later Wiis. Turns out, that's not all the Animal Crossing references in the files of the Wii Menu. No, no, no. In fact, we actually have one of the messages that was going to be sent to players alerting them of upcoming events. It's a placeholder obviously, but it does show what it would have looked like had they decided to add it into the final game. There's also an unused icon for Tom Nook, which I could see being used instead of a me and those Animal Crossing notifications. But that's just speculation. It could also have just been just a placeholder. Much like this big nosed Mario, which can actually be seen in early screenshots and videos of Double Dash. Right there, and since we're already talking about messages and memos, here's an early memo icon without rounded edges, and an early "There's no Mii here" icon that appears in places like the address book. Let's go back and check out some more unused text like these two lines, which tell the user to plug in a Nunchuk or Classic Controller into the Wii Remote. What makes this interesting is that it means that originally developers could set a flag in their channel to say to the Wii Menu, "Hey, this game requires a nunchuck or classic controller. Don't boot until one of them is plugged in." This isn't just speculation though. It's actually supported in the Wii SDK itself. in the programming guide for creating banners and icons, you'll find a note where paraphrase, it says, "The classic controller and nunchuck connection check options called NeatClassic and NeatFreestyle respectively..." which were selectable in previous versions that the banner date of creation tool, are no longer available. Do not try to use them. So from this and other info in the SDK, we now know the developers could have originally set the requirement of specific attachments in the banner.cfg.txt file which nowadays is simply used to hold all the different titles for a channel depending on the language. The version history of the icon in banner tools, tells us exactly when this feature was removed on October 13th 2006, about a month away from the release of the system. There's also some more unused text that reveals yet another removed feature from channels, a time limit. Turns out in the early days of Wii development there were a lot of ways to limit a channel that were never used, or known about until it was discovered by *struggling to say this guy's name*
Lee-o-et-le-ino. Leyet- Leoetlino. Sure. There's an absolute time limit where a game starts or stops working on a certain date, then we've got a number of launches which is like what they did with the Wii U and 3DS, where certain demos can only be played a certain number of times, then there's number of titles So like, maybe if there are too many games installed in the system, it can't run? And then, elapsed time, which could limit how long you were able to play a game in a single play session, like trials and Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Most of these are just guesses though based on the name alone, but there are some that were actually implemented in the system, but just weren't used. That would be number of launches, and as we saw in the unused text earlier, duration, neither of these limits were used by any channel throughout the whole Wii's lifetime. Well, except one and that would be believe it or not, the Homebrew Channel in 2008, on April 1st or 2nd, It's kind of hard to tell with time zones, The Homebrew Channel was first released to the public after weeks and weeks of teasing as an April Fool's demo with a 10 minute time limit. Of course, this was quickly removed by hackers, even though it wasn't meant to stay, but it does mark the only channel that was released during the Wii's lifetime that utilized the Wii menu's time limit. Honestly, it's amazing what a little bit of unused text can uncover, like this for example, GB, MB and KB otherwise known as gigabytes, megabytes, and kilobytes. Now as you probably already know the size of games and saves on the Wii aren't shown in this format. It's shown as blocks. So it looks like they would have originally shown the file size outright, instead of hiding it behind things like blocks. But here's the thing. The Wii's storage is only 512 megabytes. So there's absolutely no way it could even hold a gig. The gigabytes label must have referred to space on the SD card then, since the Wii's SDHC card support up to 32 gigs. But even then, Wii saves are never that big and WiiWare can only be up to 40 megabytes. The only thing that could have been a gig or more is like Wii and GameCube games. Does that mean you could have originally downloaded full games to your SD card and launched them from there? Actually, maybe. At E3 2005, Reggie did mention that and quote, "We announced the ability to download and play the best NES games, SNES games, Nintendo 64 games, in addition to Revolution games and Gamecube games." It kinda sounds like he was saying that you could have downloaded Wii and GameCube games, huh? Then again, It also kind of sounds like he was saying "We announced downloading NES, SNES N64 games and we also announced some Revolution games and GameCube games." Gotcha. Dang it, 2005 Reggie. You're too vague. So we can't say for certain that you could have downloaded GameCube and Wii games to your SD card, but what we can say for certain is, that there were originally around that time, two SD cards in the Wii. Not just one. The Wii's eOS or in other words, the Wii's embedded operating system even mentions the second SD slot with the text, "...SDIO slot 1: Cannot init!!!...." Now, break that down, SD is obviously for SD card, IO stands for a device that can both input data to a computer and output, it for the user and Slot being referred to as slot one is actually a big deal. because with most programming counting starts at 0, meaning that slot 1 is actually referring to a second SD card slot, that as you can see, can't initialize since after all, it's not there anymore. And so we've reached the last part of the video, and I've saved the Wii's biggest unused functionality for last, and it all starts with the disc channel. See, right around here is an unused image. Do you see it? Well, you can't, it's invisible. in the banners br lyt file or binary revolution layout file, You can set each of these images to be visible or not with 0 being invisible and 1 being visible. But if you spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to change that flag from a 0 to a 1 like I did, you can make it reappear. So let's see what this unused image looks like in action. That's right, it's a DVD. Complete with its own little reflection. At the beginning It kind of does that spin animation like the rest of it does, but after that it just sits there. There's literally no other animation besides that, but the important thing is that it means that the we could have originally played DVDs and that's supported by the fact that it actually can, if you use Homebrew, by using Homebrew, you can kind of unlock the functionality basically to actually play DVDs in your Wii. That is, if you have one of these early white Wiis, if you've got the later black ones, well, you're out of luck. So, why was this DVD playing functionality scrapped?
I mean it works, why not just keep it in? Well, my friends, that is a little something to do with licensing. The curtain consensus is that Nintendo decided after adding the DVD functionality that it just wasn't worth paying the licensing fee to Dolby, owner of the DVD for every single Wii sold. Microsoft had a similar problem with the Xbox, they also didn't want to pay the fees on every Xbox, so they found a workaround. They decided to sell a little dongle that enabled DVD playback functionality. Thanks to a tiny tiny library that was kept on the dongle. This means Microsoft would only have to pay Dolby for each DVD remote kits sold, not every Xbox even if the functionality is technically almost all there already. Nintendo on the other hand, they were just like,
"Eh, scrap the whole thing." along with another similar functionality which we can see thanks to this unused image. Thought it probably help if I put the translation. Here we go. So according to this image, the Wii Remote could have originally controlled the TV much like a universal remote. Not to mention, it also comes with this image that says TV on it, so there's really no doubt about it. Now, there was a Club Nintendo reward in Japan That was a universal remote made to look like a Wii Remote, but it's not actually a Wii Remote. It can't actually connect to the Wii.
It turns out though, this unused TV remote functionality in the Wii was actually later used Thanks to the TV no Tomo channel G Guide, a Japanese exclusive TV guide channel that lets you see what's on. Choose what you want, play it on the TV and then control the TV with the Wii Remote until you press the home button. Which takes you back to the Wii. This channel actually uses a copy of what is believed to be the library that the Wii Menu has for controlling the TV. So technically, the function is only unused in the Wii home menu, which happens to be the same place this unused images from. You can find all this stuff in Wii Menu versions as early as version 1.0, almost a year and a half before the TV no Tomo channel was released in Japan. And a little fun fact, it turns out the TV guide channel was actually developed by HAL Laboratory, the same people who made like Kirby and all that, which would explain this little unused jingle that's in this channel. *kirby 1-up jingle* Poyo. *laughing* *coughing* Hey everyone, its endcard Andrew here! I hope you all enjoyed watching this as much as I loved making it, it was super nostalgic for me, if you want consider supporting me on Patreon if you join by the end of this year, you get a free Beta 64 sticker plus you get access to bloopers, behind-the-scenes things, and the new beta cast! So, if you want consider supporting the show. Anyway, that's it. Hope you have a great day!
