Today, we say goodbye to a beloved member of the Nintendo family — the Wii Shop Channel. Launching back on December 10, 2006, the shop has been home to many great WiiWare games and, of course, the first Virtual Console. While the ability to purchase or redeem points within the shop was removed on March 25, 2018, you could still access and redownload previously purchased titles until today.
Some of the top WiiWare games on the service included the Bit.Trip series, Bomberman Blast, the ReBirth series, Dr. Mario Online Rx, FAST Racing League, Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles: My Life as a King/Darklord, Jett Rocket, LIT, LostWinds, Mega Man 9/10, NyxQuest, Retro City Rampage, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, Tales of Monkey Island, Tetris Party, and many more. On the Virtual Console side, we had great titles from NES, SNES, N64, Master System, Commodore 64, TurboGrafx-16, Genesis, Neo-Geo, and the arcade.
Some of these games are only available via the Wii Shop Channel (the Art Style series, Bomberman Blast, Bubble Bobble Plus, Excitebike World Rally, the Rebirth series, and more) so if you have not downloaded those titles, be sure to do so right away before it goes away forever.
Others like Final Fantasy IV: The After Years do appear on other consoles but not in the same way contain the same level of quality. Again, make sure you get them on your system or SD card while you can.On top of the Wii Shop going away, several Wii Channels like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon will also cease to function on January 31.
Will Nintendo bring more of these WiiWare titles over to the eShop on Nintendo Switch? Will they ever launch a real Virtual Console for Switch? One can only hope. Well, that and play those games on our Wii consoles while we wait.
As we say goodbye to the Wii Shop forever, we want to know: What were some of your favorite WiiWare games? Let us know in the comment section.
Steve is the Senior Editor of NintendoFuse and co-host of the NintendoFuse Podcast. He’s been a Nintendo gamer since age 6 and has been on staff with NintendoFuse since 2008.