As announced at Nintendo’s E3 conference, the Wii U will be able to play all original Wii titles, however it will not play any Gamecube titles. On top of this, Wii titles won’t look any better on the Wii U than they do on the original system. Nintendo has no plans on upscaling the already existing Wii titles for the new system.
Reggie Fils-Aime, from Nintendo of America, revealed the information in an interview with Gametrailers earlier this week. “It will not do that,” he said when speaking about the possibility of upscaling titles. “That’s really driven by the hardware, and the original Wii games were built for a specific type of hardware. There’s no mechanism to quote-unquote ‘up-res’ that unless we launch a brand new game.” Nintendo’s PR Director, Mark Franklin, also confirmed this via Giant bomb.
This is surely disappointing information, but it can be expected. Nintendo just doesn’t have the time or the means to take every existing Wii title and produce new medium for it allowing it to be displayed in HD. There is a PC emulator of the Wii that displays played games in 720p, which makes this news even more hurtful. There wasn’t any more detail on whether new Wii U games would be in full HD on the big screen or not, which still leaves that information in speculation at this point.