Top of my head? The DS’s second screen? It worked for a while, but now seems pretty well an abandoned idea. The 3D features of the 3DS. StreetPass. AR games. Their brief experiments with free-to-play on the 3DS. The whole darn Virtual Boy. Need I go on?

One of these features was the idea of system-supported services that software could use to interact with the player outside of borders of their channel. Miis were the finest example of this, of course, and amazingly Nintendo hasn’t abandoned them yet, although ideas like Miis that could travel between systems on their own have been conveniently forgotten.

But on the Wii, there were a few less publicized things that games could do. Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel were known to send you messages on the system bulletin board to congratulate you on winning, or to give you hints of Stars to find.

About a year ago GVG did a recounting of Wii games that used, of all things, data from the Weather Forecast Channel. They pinned down nine pieces of software that did this. It’s a feature that Peter Molyneux notably abandoned when he directed Black & White (after announcing it), but Nintendo actually did it. Here is the video, which is a fairly padded 9½ minutes:

The title says nine games used it, but the channel only lists seven, and not all of them are even games! The software named:

• Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (could be enabled in Options)
• Nights: Journey Into Dreams (in the Nightopian garden)
• My Aquarium and its sequel, WiiWare titles
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour (enable in Options)
• In Japan: Rilakkuma: Minna de Goyururi Seikatsu
• WiiRoom, a Japan-only video-on-demand service

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The experiences of these channels, the Mii Channel, the News Channel, the Weather Channel, the Shop Channel and the like, are receding in memory, although there are fan efforts to revive them and connect them to new information sources. But at the other end of their development life, of their pre-release development very little has ever been known. Early Wiis had stubs in their place, that only directed the user to installing a launch-day update. (I experienced this myself! I drove 140 miles in order to wait in a line for a Wii on its launch day, November 19, 2006. I’m objectively insane.)

Those stubs weren’t the true original versions of the Wii Channels, they had been in development within Nintendo for some time. Those development versions of the Wii software have never been leaked outside the company, but there exists footage of them from various sources. Bjohn on Youtube has compiled what we know about the development Wii Channels into a 21-minute video. Here it is:

There’s a fair amount there, including early versions of the Internet Channel and early evidence of plans to include DVD support. (The Wii has a fully-operational DVD drive, but to avoid playing a license fee to the DVD Consortium it cannot play DVDs without hacks.)

Beta Wii Channels! (Bjohn on Youtube, 21 minutes)

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