Nintendo Switch – Nintendo Wii Leak Reveals Bulletin Board Channel & Early Wii Shop Design

A recent leak reveals a couple of unused apps for the Nintendo Wii, including a scrapped Bulletin Board channel and a prototype Wii Shop Channel.

A handful of scrapped Nintendo Wii apps have just been leaked, revealing an unproduced Bulletin Board Channel and a prototype version of the Wii Shop. This is just the latest in a series of leaks regarding the long-running game publisher and console manufacturer over the past year or so, not the least of which was the massive “Gigaleak” that uncovered a great deal of Nintendo’s secret projects that never got off the ground in the latter half of 2020.

Among these hidden plans were a canceled Pokémon MMO and 3DS sequels for Pokémon X & Y. Additional hidden content featured in the leak was cut material from existing titles like a playable Luigi in Super Mario 64 and the source code for the unreleased Star Fox 2, among several games that did see the light of day. There were also several interesting hardware reveals in the Nintendo gigaleaks, such as an early design for the Switch and a prototype version of the Wii console and its famous Nunchuck controller – as well as other surprises like a portable GameCube and the occasionally-rumored Wii Startup disk.

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As reported by NintendoLife, Twitter user lombTV posted a leak of two ultimately unused Nintendo Wii channels last week. The first is for a news app that was titled “What’s New” or “Bulletin Board,” which would have provided users with new updates on games or other such developments. Of course, the Wii would ultimately use the Wii Message Board channel for this function instead. Additionally, lombTV also posted an image of a prototype Wii Shop Channel, one that was dated August 18, 2006. This version looks very different from the one that was eventually used until it was shut down in 2019, as can be seen in the Twitter posts below.

The famous Gigaleak is far from the first or last time Nintendo has found its internal archives possibly breached, as recent leaks have hinted at the existence of the often-rumored 4K Nintendo Switch Pro in the form of a price increase and Nintendo’s potential slate of releases for 2022. On a more dangerous level, the company also suffered a major data breach last year which endangered 160,000 Nintendo Switch accounts.

There could be any number of reasons why Nintendo ultimately chose not to use the Bulletin Board and Wii Shop channels featured in lombTV’s leaks. Perhaps Nintendo didn’t like the designs used in these prototypes, or simply came up with a better way to perform the functions these channels were meant to have. In any case, it seems that there is still no shortage of the secrets that Nintendo’s recent round of hackings and leaks have uncovered, and it might not be long before another leak crops up.

Next: Nintendo Originally Planned To Be In 2020 Olympics Opening Ceremony

Source: NintendoLife, lombTV/Twitter

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