Wii Virtual Console's cancelled 4th pillar
Published on 05 Jul 2025
Upon early plans for Wii Virtual Console from August 2005, their plans was to emulate the NES, SNES and N64, their first party systems.
But a “fourth pillar” as they described it, was planned and they named it 「21世紀版のファミコン」, translated as: “21st Century Version of Famicom”.
This was the idea of Genyo Takeda, lead developer of the Wii at the time, and has contributed to Nintendo’s hardware for decades at that point. While not fully detailed in the email database leak from the 2020 gigaleak, it is implied to be NES games with better graphics, where the gameplay is untouched. A version of this idea was implemented by the developer of the SNES emulator for Wii VC, but SNES emulation took priority over this project, and seemingly was never really worked on since.
It feels like this idea might be very similar to Mesen’s HD Packs where you can replace NES graphics with different ones, including higher quality graphics. Here’s a few exemples from the community, with links included:
Here’s snippets of the only emails that mentions this project as is:
-21世紀版のファミコン
FC, SFC, N64に続く「21世紀版のファミコン」を第4の柱として進める。
これは竹田からのお題。ゲーム性は触らず、ドネリーがNTDとグラフィックを改造している。本日方向性が決定する。
-パッケージ
ドネリーから、特定の4本のソフトとエミュレータのパッケージを渡された。
ドネリーと畠山でエミュレータのデバッグをして、本格的なデバッグの準備を行なう。このパッケージに取扱説明書は入っていない。
なお、キャラクタを豪華にする21世紀版ファミコンはスケジュールに載っていない。
やるかどうかは未定で、現在はSFCを優先する。