This article was originally written for TheNintendoVillage.com, a website I founded and ran from 2018 to 2021.

You may have heard about the Wonderful 101 Kickstarter recently. Platinum’s crowd funding efforts for a Switch port of the game saw it smash through $1m in a matter of hours, and it’s now hit multiple stretch goals, including both Steam and PS4 ports, as well as a whole new 2D spin-off challenge.

In an interview with Nintendo Everything that took place before the remaster was announced, the game’s director Hideki Kamiya talked about why Platinum wanted to bring the game to a wider audience:

“Well, we first released Wonderful 101 back in 2013 on Wii U, and for various reasons it wasn’t a successful business endeavor for us. Inaba and I have since lamented that not many players were able to experience the game.
I’m not really sure when we first started talking about bringing the game over to new platforms, but we had to consult with Nintendo first. When we sat down with them, we explained our situation: how the game wasn’t successful upon release and how we wanted to bring it to modern consoles.
I mean, it was really disappointing for us, you know? We worked so hard to make this high quality game and we were hoping a lot of gamers would play it, but that didn’t really pan out. So as a result of our negotiations, the kindness of Nintendo has made both the ports and this campaign possible.”

Given the relative flop that was the Wii U, it’s not entirely surprising that Wonderful 101 ‘wasn’t a successful business endeavour’, as Kamiya euphemistically calls it. Those that did play the game found it to be a ton of fun though, so it’s great that Platinum were able to work something out with Nintendo in order to bring it to a larger audience.

Did you back the Wonderful 101 Remastered Kickstarter? Let us know below!

Source: Nintendo Everything