Yesterday’s findings that Nintendo has filed yet another patent that may or may not pertain to the prospects of what the Nintendo NX is has brought attention to something I’ve been thinking about for a few months regarding Nintendo’s new home console system releasing next March. That question is will the Nintendo NX have support for the Wii U Gamepad? Since Nintendo has held on to any official news on the NX tighter than a mom hugging her child before going off to college, nobody really knows anything about this thing. This naturally leads to wild speculation or even people 3D printing fake “NX” controllers (based on the December patent filed by Nintendo) as a gag.
If these patents mean anything for what the Nintendo NX will be, it’s not unbelievable to think that the NX could just straight up support the Wii U gamepad as another option to control the NX.
For one, If you look back at the Wii, it came fully stocked with four Gamecube controller ports, so legacy controller support was available for the Wii. Now, it’s certainly not unfair to argue that those were included because; first the Wii supported Gamecube discs and secondly the Wii had such a radically different way to control games Nintendo simply wanted to add a way for players to plug in a familiar controller to play games like Super Smash Bros. Moving on to Nintendo’s next home hardware entry the Wii U also came right out of the gate with legacy support for the previous generation controller as Wiimotes were fully compatible.
So that is two console generations in a row that had support for the previous consoles controllers. One connection between the Wii supporting Gamecube controllers and the Wii U supporting Wiimotes was that both consoles also were backwards compatible with the games too. This brings another interesting, nagging question to the table, will the NX be backwards compatible with Wii U games? While game releases on the Wii U are few and far between, the games that have hit have REALLY hit. Games like Mario Kart 8, Splatoon and Super Mario Maker are still played and played online and played often by millions of appreciative fans. Why not allow fans to carry over those games to their new Nintendo system, especially at launch, when the new game lineup will most likely be sparse. And if those games carry over, the gamepad would likely need to be carried over too or else Splatoon and Super Mario Maker would not work smoothly.
There is one final nugget that may show some potential to answering will the Nintendo NX support the Wii U Gamepad too. Back in late November of last year Nintendo somewhat quietly released information that Wii U gamepads could now be bought separately, but only in Japan. While this seems like a relatively insignificant Thanksgiving week news release, perhaps it could be taken as a sign that the wonky, divisive tablet controller could be available for use with the NX as a sold separately (or brought over from your Wii U) peripheral.
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