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nintendoHow the Wii U Turned a Sales Flop Into Collector GoldNintendo shipped roughly 13.5 million Wii U consoles across the machine's entire life. The Wii before it cleared 100 million. That gulf — the hardest faceplant in Nintendo's home-console history — is exactly why the Wii U has quietly become one of the most collectable Nintendo platforms you can still build without remortgaging the house. The maths is simple: a tiny install base meant tiny print runs, and a small library means actually finishing a collection is achievable. Add the eShop closing
nintendoThe Wii is everywhere, so what's actually rare?Somewhere in a drawer near you, a white Wii is resting under a tangle of cables, its sensor bar wrapped around a remote with a slightly chewed silicone jacket. Nintendo shipped over 100 million of these things, and it sometimes feels like half of them were donated, boot-saled or handed to a nephew before 2013 was out. That glut is exactly what makes the Wii interesting to collect: the hardware is nearly free, so all the collector attention concentrates in the stuff that isn't. Flip it over fir
GlossaryWhat a Slab Actually Tells You About a Sealed GameTwo sealed copies of the same game can lead completely different lives. One sits naked in a drawer, shrinkwrap intact, waiting to be believed. The other is entombed in acrylic with a label reading something like 9.4 A++ — and suddenly everyone at the meetup wants to hold it. If that label reads like tax code to you, here's the vocabulary, minus the mystique. Slab vs raw, and what the plastic really signals A slab is the tamper-evident acrylic case a grading company — WATA and VGA are the name