Nintendo Leak Reveals Early Wii Remote Ideas And Designs

The Nintendo "gigaleak" from 2020 is apparently the gift that keeps on giving, and now early prototypes and renders for the Wii Remote have emerged online. The designs were tweeted by game developer and preservationist lombTV, who has posted other information they've managed to pull out from the leaked data as well.

These mock-ups aren't that far off from the final Wiimote design, though the lime green color is definitely different from the clean white shade that defined the console. In the below tweet, you can see how Nintendo staff debated on whether to include X and Y buttons for increased functionality. You can also see a remote control-style ring around the A button in the later two designs.

In the below tweet, you can see that the Nintendo has definitely moved past the green idea to a design that is much closer to the final Wii Remote, but it seems that the minus and plus buttons were a sticking point. These mock-ups replace them with "pause" and "back" buttons, a design decision that is much more in line with modern controllers like the DualSense and the Xbox Series X controller. Other potential approaches replace them with left and right arrows.

TV also links what appears to be a mock-up of a test controller. It's pretty underwhelming compared to the final design, but that's to be expected.

The Nintendo "gigaleak" has produced a truly staggering amount of cut and unseen content, including the legendary Zelda: Ocarina of Time Space World demo, the revelation that Luigi was actually in Super Mario 64 the whole time, as well as a number of playable prototypes to famous games like Super Mario Kart and Yoshi's Island.