The Wii is many things: it’s a family friendly console designed to get men and women, young or old, playing together; it set the standard for motion control in video games; it was Nintendo’s first platform to utilize a full-sized optical disc; but most of all, it was fun. It was not without its faults, nor was it ever free of criticism. As a piece of technical hardware, the Wii was inferior to its contemporaries, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, in physical storage space, in processing power and in multimedia functions. Even before the console hit the market, there was a vocal backlash directed at its name – the ‘Wii’.

Up until April 27, 2006 just seven months before its North American launch date, Nintendo’s then next generation console was unofficially known as the ‘Revolution’. Following its name change at that year’s E3, Nintendo was met with a barrage of jokes based on the new name. Justification came shortly thereafter as crass jokes spread across the internet. The console’s pronunciation as “we” represented the company’s intent to blur the line between gamers of different ages. Nintendo was creating a new market of consumers, one that had yet to be introduced to the world of video games. Furthermore, the two i’s were said to imitate two people standing side-by-side, playing together, again an initiative of Nintendo’s that would get people up and off the couch.

Despite Nintendo’s best efforts to quell the storm of negativity, the gaming press wasn’t going to have it. The irony is that no matter who you were, when the Wii finally launched on November 19 or in the aftermath of it’s sales blitz, you wanted one.

But it was still easy to hate. It wasn’t as powerful as its competitors, its online functionality was hindered, and its launch line-up was less than impressive: its only games of notoriety being The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a mirrored-port of a GameCube game; Red Steel, an urban hack-and-slash whose promise of fluid motion controls was unmet; and Call of Duty 3, the forgotten soldier of the franchise before the storm that was Modern Warfare. Two highly anticipated titles, the conclusion to Retro Studio’s Metroid Prime series, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and the long-awaited Super Smash Bros. Brawl, were pushed back to later dates, leaving the Wii’s holiday window looking rather barren.

For most of the first year it stayed like this. Gamers could only play so much of Wii Sports and the lack of third-party support, a common problem with Nintendo consoles since the GameCube, discouraged all those waiting for AAA titles. It wasn’t until the Holiday of 2008 that the next installment of the Mario franchise hit store shelves.

For the first time since its launch, people were excited again. To this day Super Mario Galaxy remains the third highest rated game on Metacritic of all time, and is considered by many to be on par, if not better, than Mario’s previous masterpiece Super Mario 64. Finally, the Wii had arrived.

But alas, the Wii could not shake its reputation. It had endured a year’s worth of insults and severe lack of content. It seemed that in the public eye, not even Mario could save it. For all the anticipation and all of the promises, Nintendo had once again found themselves in a hole. The console continued to sell and exceed expectations for the company but in the mind of the hardcore gamer, Nintendo had sold out.

Of all those I’ve spoken to who have expressed either frustration or anger towards Nintendo, the Wii is the singular point of discussion. The motion controls, the graphical limitations and the online components are the most common complaints as far as the hardware goes but the number one complaint that I have heard in the six years that the Wii has been out is simply, “Where are the games?”

In the first year, I might’ve sipped a bit of the haterade and joined in on some of the anti-Nintendo uproar. But then I discovered something wonderful, a brilliant tool that could help me overcome my gamer angst: the internet. Where were the games, they asked? Right at the tips of my fingers on Amazon, on retail websites and all across the digital catalog. Therein lied the root of Nintendo’s problem – marketing.

You see, all those concerns about a lack of games or support from third-party companies seemed completely valid when you walked into your local GameStop or Best Buy and saw a row or two of Wii games and then five walls across of Xbox 360 and PS3 titles. To the ordinary consumer, it’d be easy to jump to the conclusion that the Wii had no games. What you see is what you get, after all. Then I learned a thing or two about marketing, about distribution and about localization.

I learned that not everything that is made can be marketed. The money that would be spent on commercials or store signage would be wasted if the sales expectations were not met. So the big games, the Marios, the Zeldas, those would get all the publicity because everyone knows about them and everyone will buy them. That’s just the way business works – you market what sells.

The problem with this is that in a generation when you have three corporate entities in the gaming industry who do you make the games for? Obviously first-party companies and subsidiaries would remain exclusive to their parents so you’d get Halo and Gears of War for Xbox, Infamous and Uncharted for Sony and Metroid and Kirby for the Wii. These are big name games coming from big name companies. But what about Activision, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and Rockstar? The answer was simple: multiplatform. Make the game available for all platforms and reap greater rewards. The issue with that: Nintendo’s console could not handle the games that were being developed on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, for the ‘core’ audience. Because of this, most developers tended to shy away from a market that had already been saturated by family games and, as gamers lovingly referred to them, “shovelware.” Why would these big companies waste time on a console that they couldn’t even take as much advantage of as they wanted to?

The games that the Wii did eventually get came from the smaller, less financially-capable companies barely made a splash in the market: Tri-Crescendo (Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon), Grasshopper Manufacture (No More Heroes and No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle), Vanillaware (Muramasa: The Demon Blade), Platinum Games (MadWorld), Cing (Little King’s Story), Treasure (Sin and Punishment: Star Successor) and so on.

Not a one of these games was multiplatform (although No More Heroes received an HD port in 2011 for the PS3 and Xbox 360), and yet if you were to look at the sales records for them, you’d be less than impressed. Not because they were bad games, far from it, but with few exceptions there was little to no marketing done on their behalf. As a result, stores either never carried them to begin with, or never restocked the shelves after their one or two initial copies sold out. And the tragedy is that most average consumers have likely still never heard of them.

I can understand the frustration with many of Nintendo’s business practices: the negligent online support shows how out of touch Nintendo is with the current generation of core gamers and the hardware deficiencies certainly hold back the console in the eyes of a worldwide market. I was told once by a colleague that the Wii is not a current generation console simply because there is nothing on it that couldn’t be on another platform. To an extent, he’s right. The hardware determines the generational gaps. When the technology improves, then the need to create a new product is there. The current iteration of consoles is the longest there has ever been.

But I’ve noticed a trend in the market lately. For as powerful as these current systems are, this year’s E3 made one point very clear: they are no longer purely gaming consoles. They are entertainment centers. They are computers. They will continue to evolve and become even more. The benefit is there and in the eyes of a consumer, having a single unit that can serve all of your necessary functions is ideal. But what happens when Microsoft buys the rights to use Blu-ray, and Sony starts charging a monthly cost for their online service to better support and maintain the network? Then what will distinguish one from the other?

Recently, members of a fan-driven community known as Operation Rainfall have taken it upon themselves to get several games localized in America that Nintendo had refused to support: Xenoblade Chronicles earlier this year and most recently The Last Story. The third and final game in their quest is Pandora’s Tower, which is currently scheduled for a European release in April of 2012. If the fans can be so passionate about the games, why can’t the developers and publishers?

With the Wii U set to launch in a few months, there’s one question on everyone’s mind (besides cost): what can I play? Nintendo needs to hit the ground running with AAA titles and this time they need to be supporting even the smaller companies as fully as it can. Having had a chance to get my hands on the system at a recent private demonstration, the potential is there. It’s a nice gesture to offer games like Batman: Arkham City and Mass Effect 3 but you don’t want to set another trend of simply picking up the scraps of the other consoles. Where Nintendo needs to shine is in its exclusivity and its first and its third party support for new, marketable games.

When the Wii launched six years ago, I went from an excited prospect to a discouraged fan quickly. I thought Nintendo had betrayed me – me, Mike, their loyal fan! How could they?! But then I discovered that there were games that existed beyond the veil. Nintendo didn’t abandon me, they simply prioritized differently. The hardcore market still existed on the Wii, I just hadn’t realized it at the time. Here I am, six years later, and I can proudly say I regret nothing. Some of the most fun I’ve had this generation has come specifically from Wii games (Monster Hunter Tri and Xenoblade Chronicles). Would I have enjoyed either game better in high definition? I can’t lie – of course I would have. But who wouldn’t?

In an interview recently, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime stated that gamers will never be satisfied. We always want bigger and better. We could get a game that is, for hypothetical purposes, the greatest looking game of all time, and someone would say “Well I wish they would have done xyz better.” No one is an exception. To demand more from the industry is how it can grow and evolve. To be content results in stagnation and nobody wants that. But I come from an age when games were judged by one thing only: how fun it was. If it isn’t fun, why bother playing it?

And you know what? I’ve had a ton of fun with the Wii.