Thing is, everybody else found this out in 2006. And just like every other game developer found out, it always requires more resources than you think. You see, Nintendo, by its own design, was the last major gamemaker on Earth to not have any experience whatsoever with creating high-definition games. 'The reason for the delayed release of our first-party titles was the fact that completing the games released at the same time as the launch of Wii U required more development resources than expected, so some staff members from development teams working on other titles had to help complete them,' Iwata said. U, without which Wii U could not have been launched at all.

So why did Nintendo delay all of those games? At a recent Q&A session with investors, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata dropped the bomb: He had to delay these games, he said, because he had to pull development staff off of them to help finish NintendoLand and New Super Mario Bros. It worked in the case of my household, and evidently in others as well. Hence, at least a stopgap measure of Virtual Console: With no retail releases to speak of, may as well get some downloadable classics on there to generate buzz and cause people to turn their machines on. Meanwhile, you've still got three and a half million suckers who bought a Wii U who have nothing to do with it. Wii U sales slumped terribly after the holidays, and massive delays of almost its entire slate of game releases have left it without any reasonable path to success for a very long time. Quite frankly I don't even think we'd have gotten this initial smattering of Virtual Console games on Wii U had Nintendo not been at a desperation point. I've been beating that drum since 2006 and the skin's about to break.

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