Wii U mod crams the entire system into the GamePad

Without the Wii U, there would be no Switch. Nintendo had some unique ideas with the Wii U, but the marketing and limitations of the platform led to a rather sizable failure for Nintendo. Thankfully, Nintendo learned a lot from the Wii U’s missteps, which resulted in a successor that’s one of the company’s biggest hits.

One major complaint about the Wii U was that you couldn’t stray too far from the console itself when using the GamePad. If you stepped more than 10 feet away, you could end up losing signal from the console and then it was game over. What if that wasn’t the case though? That’s what modder YveltalGriffin set out to explore, and it resulted in a self-contained Wii U.

YveltalGriffin spent 3 months working on a Wii U mod that takes the guts of the Wii U and shrinks them down 70% for housing within the GamePad itself. This required some serious electrical work to achieve, and is far more than just chopping off a few board elements here and there. If you want to see the near-end result of this mod, check out the video below.