According to Rolling Stone, Nintendo is finally getting around to shutting down its online Wii Shop marketplace, the service that allowed Wii owners to download games, some apps, and things that seemed fun at the time like a “channel” for voting on other people’s Mii characters. The Wii Shop isn’t shutting down right away, as Nintendo has confirmed that it will still be available through 2018, and at that point it’ll have been running for over 13 years. Considering that Nintendo has released two new game consoles since then, those are pretty surprising legs—even though it’s been a long time since the company was actually releasing new things on the Wii Shop with any consistency.
One small wrinkle to all of this is that the Wii Shop is necessary for transferring save data from a Wii console to a Wii U, so anyone out there who still plays a Wii but is hoping to upgrade to a Wii U at some point should take care of that as soon as possible. Also, they should probably just skip the Wii U and buy a Switch.
Anyway, the Wii Shop may be going away, but we’ll always have its iconic background music.