It’s no secret that Nintendo was in a bit of a dark time at the end of the Wii U era. With sales down and everyone awaiting the next console (or should we say ‘NX console’?), the company needed something to bring in the big bucks over the holidays. The answer, alongside amiibo, was the NES and SNES Classic systems, and boy, did they work.

Ever ready to give a cracking PR response, Reggie was ready for the mini systems’ launch. We all knew that they were something of a stopgap for the big N while the Switch was still in the oven, and the then-NOA president told Kotaku as much at the time: “these were limited time opportunities that were a way for us as a business to bridge from the conclusion of Wii U as a hardware system to the launch of Nintendo Switch”.

One decade on, Reggie touched on the topic again in a recent addition to the NYU Game Centre Lecture Series (found around the 57:30 mark in the above video), though the gift of time has meant that there’s less need for business pleasantries in 2026 — he can be a lot more to-the-point these days, it seems (thanks for the heads up, Nintendo Everything).

“We did that to sustain our business,” Reggie said of the NES and SNES Classic launches, “because we needed something to sell at volume come the holiday season”. A rather candid breakdown, we’d say, but there’s more. These systems, alongside cutting the 8GB Wii U SKU and advertising more indie content, were “a series of commercial ideas,” he continued, “knowing full well that the Wii U was on life support”.

It was a smart move, it turns out. By late 2019, the two classic systems had combined for more than 10 million sales, tiding Nintendo over as the Switch picked up steam. There were those of us who believed that more classic systems were in the pipeline (never forget those ‘N64 Classic Mini’ rumours), but with business booming and NSO expanding every month, we think it’s safe to assume that such merch is a thing of the past.