Somehow. Somehow it’s been 5 years.

Well no, Wii Room released December 2020, I joined in January 2021, so it’s basically been 5 years.

No. I thought when I got into university I’d stop entirely.

Half a decade.

A lot of stuff’s gone on. A lot of rereleases, a lot of our releases.

Well it’s interesting, when I started off it was actually meant to be a replacement for RiiConnect24*, and I guess it has become that.

Yeah, it’s really funny to think about.

About 20 people including testers.

I think they were. When Wii Room released their photos were a part of the trailer.

Yeah, I think now we have like 70-odd people.

I didn’t think we’d actually end up doing a giveaway on Wii Room, that was pretty cool. Real food for sure I didn’t think that would happen. I thought it was way too risky and unfeasible. Huge shoutout to Guistino.

Also 2021.

It was, yeah.

It was in December, yes. I think it was 2022.

Yeah, end of 2023 to early 2024 would’ve been the merge.

It was, and there was a lot of people who didn’t want it happening either. It took a lot of convincing for it to go through.

Yeah, it was a very interesting time to be on the team.

End of 2021. October.

For sure. In 2021 I was 14 or 15, now I’m 19. It’s really insane, I’ve spent my entire teenage years in WiiLink.

That’s actually insane to say out loud, oh my god. I think being 14, being handed the keys was very interesting for me. Having to lead a team of everyone who’s older than me, I was scared of people not respecting me because of my age. But eventually I got over it. I think because I knew how everything worked and I knew how to develop stuff, everyone respected me and they trusted what I was telling was right. And I think that we’re in a good place now, it’s been around for 5 years, nothing terrible’s happened and we’re still around.

For sure. The team’s grown exponentially since then, so I think that’s something I also had to work around, a more diverse team with more skills. The localization team grew exponentially, and that was a whole obstacle in itself, making the hard decisions, which languages to have and which not to have. And the content team was a drastically new one from when we started. I remember I’d be the one encoding videos and usually it’d be random Nintendo trailers. But now we have a whole team dedicated to it, which is good because I don’t have that much time anymore. Also WiiLink Originals, I never thought that would be a thing, that was just something we talked about. It would’ve just been a podcast talking about WiiLink, I didn’t think it would be full on shows like Pineapple News or Homebrew Tea.

Yeah. For sure. I think that’s my favorite addition to WiiLink. We have more content other than “I can just watch this through YouTube”, no you have to go through Wii Room, which is a pretty novel idea.

Yeah, I gotta work on Mii Contest Channel. It’s a little broken right now, the mail-outs aren’t working properly.

Honestly, it’s whatever I think won’t take me the longest, but is also high enough priority where I have to do it. So if something goes down, I’m going to drop everything and fix it. But if it’s an issue that just degrades performance but doesn’t entirely bring something down, it’ll be when I have free time, I think I look at the first thing that I get pinged for. We have a Jira* board but a lot of people aren’t using it unfortunately. I do look at it sometimes, but there’s nothing much I can do if people don’t put their issues in there.

Please. Please use the Jira. I know Jinjo’s done a very good job with it, but they’re the only one who’s done it in a while.

Burrito, Citrus, Guistino, Oscie, Ryal, Grunt and Luna. I think those are the remaining ones on the team. And Diego.

Yeah, a lot of them moved on. Falling out with the community or whatever, just a lot left. It is fine, we gotta grow, we gotta leave sometimes.

It was interesting, because it was Snoot, they were the original lead. And they did a good job of transitioning me. I think at that point I took over as lead dev because they got busy with university. It was really easy to follow their code, and I think now it’s really hard because at the time it was just Wii Room and Digicam* that was released, but now we have almost every channel, we have 5 dedicated servers, actual finances, and countless services that it’d be very hard to transition at this point, it was much easier when it was smaller. But it’s grown into something massive, and it’d be really hard to train someone to learn everything, especially when it’s a volunteer project.

I’m gonna be 24 in another 5 years.

That’s crazy.

Yeah.

There’s a lot more we can do with this console.

We’re 10 years away from that, that’s gonna be really interesting.

I think December 2036.

For sure, we do have time.

If you’re someone like me, when I started I was in Grade 9, beginning of high school, something like this was a really good opportunity to get involved in, especially for developing your skills, your resumé or uni applications. But don’t do it just for university applications. If I didn’t actually have a passion for this project, I would’ve burnt out so hard, and I would’ve hated this, and I would’ve 100% not made it to 5 years, so I think you have to have a passion for what you’re doing. And if you do have passion, everything will be okay and you will push through, even if it’s extremely hard. And there’s been really hard times with this service, not a lot of people know about it or see it, but there’s a lot of hardships.