Nintendo Wii U

The Wii U is one of gaming's great cautionary tales, a good idea undone by muddled execution and worse marketing. Arriving in 2012, it was Nintendo's attempt to follow the phenomenal Wii while jumping, belatedly, into high definition. Its defining feature was the GamePad, a chunky controller with a built-in touchscreen that could mirror the television, enabling second-screen play or letting you keep gaming when someone else needed the TV.

The concept had promise, but Nintendo never communicated it. The name itself sowed confusion, with many shoppers believing the Wii U was merely a tablet accessory for the existing Wii rather than an entirely new console. Third-party publishers, wary after the Wii's weak support for their games and unimpressed by hardware only modestly ahead of the aging 360 and PS3, abandoned the platform quickly, leaving Nintendo to fill the calendar almost alone.

That it could not do fast enough. Long software droughts left the console starved of reasons to buy it, and it sold barely 13 million units across its life, a catastrophic result that made it Nintendo's worst-selling home console and threw the company into genuine crisis.

And yet the games were often superb. Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, Super Smash Bros., Splatoon, Bayonetta 2, and the launch-window Zelda that became Breath of the Wild were among the generation's best, simply trapped on a machine almost nobody owned. Many were later rescued and remastered on the Switch, where they finally found their audience.

The Wii U's true legacy is what it taught Nintendo. Its failures in messaging, third-party relations, and hardware positioning were studied and corrected, and the hybrid instinct behind its portable GamePad screen pointed directly at the Switch. In that sense the Wii U was a painful, expensive prototype for the most successful console Nintendo would ever make, a failure that made a triumph possible.