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An early prototype for the Wii's controller was an accelerometer-equipped disc you gripped in both hands, with a huge star-shaped button in the middle surrounded by smaller buttons. It was made out of orange plastic, so Nintendo's hardware team nicknamed it the cheddar cheese. Surprisingly enough, no-one liked it. Cheddar cheese was simple enough to use, and accurate, but it looked weird - and Nintendo's developers thought it unsuited to the company's own software.Nevertheless cheddar cheese was an important stepping-stone for Nintendo. It demonstrated that innovation is not just about new experiences, but their form factor. Originality had to be matched to simplicity and desirability. Such thinking led to the brilliance of the Wii remote, and a sales phenomenon. With Wii U and its gamepad, there's more than a whiff of cheddar cheese.
Nintendo's figures for the Wii U's first months on sale, from November through to March, are terrible. The headline number of 3.45 million units sold worldwide isn't the killer fact, but the split behind it: 3.06 million of those came in the first month. Since that point Wii U has tanked - there's no other way to put it - with even the release of traditional big-hitters like Dragon Quest 10 failing to make a dent in the Japanese market. If you believe certain analysts, April saw things getting even worse in the US with the Wii U shifting under 40,000 units, easily outsold by the 360 and PS3 - and, even more embarrassingly, the Wii.
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