This interview was recorded on November 22nd, 2025 over voice chat using Discord.

Becca: So. It’s been 5 years.

Noah: Somehow. Somehow it’s been 5 years.

Becca: I mean technically I guess you’ve been here since 2021, so it’s been 4 years.

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

Becca: Oh, so that’s pretty much 5 years then. Did you think you’d still be here after 5 years?

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

Becca: 5 years is a really long amount of time if you think about it.

Noah: Half a decade.

Becca: We’ve done quite a lot in the last 5 years. Most of the channels have been rereleases, we’ve “ate” 2 services.

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

Becca: Do you think WiiLink right now is what we imagined it would be in 2020, or do you think it’s taken a different direction since then?

Noah: 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.

_{*RiiConnect24 - Defunct WiiConnect24 revival service. Ran from 2015 until merging with WiiLink in 2023.}

Becca: In a sort of roundabout way, we’ve sort of ended up there.

Noah: Yeah, it’s really funny to think about.

Becca: There’s been quite a lot of team members, and people who’ve left and joined throughout the years. How big was the team when you first joined?

Noah: About 20 people including testers.

Becca: Including testers, were they part of the team?

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

Becca: Oh. So I guess if 20 includes testers, it’s grown quite significantly.

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

Becca: To be fair, we have branched out a bit, so it’s to be expected. Is there things you’ve done that you didn’t think you’d end up doing when it started? Something like real food ordering or Wii Room content.

Noah: 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.

Becca: When did development on that start?

Noah: Also 2021.

Becca: So it was pretty early on.

Noah: It was, yeah.

Becca: I still remember the Food Channel launch in December 2022. I think it was 2022?

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

Becca: 2023 was the whole merger thing.

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

Becca: I mean god, that was a huge deal. I remember when we got messages in the developer Discord that we might be handed down the RiiConnect24 channels and services. That was wild to see in my notifications.

Noah: 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.

Becca: I think overall it was the right decision. The idea of having two competing services wasn’t bad in theory, but I saw a lot of positive comments when the merger was announced. It was also in the first 3 months that I joined, I had to deal with that, which was very funny.

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

Becca: I recall from the last interview that we did, you became the lead in 2022?

Noah: End of 2021. October.

Becca: Right. Do you think you’ve changed the way you’ve approached things since then? In terms of development or management.

Noah: 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.

Becca: Oh god.

Noah: 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.

Becca: Team relationship and dynamic wise, I don’t think we’ve been in a better place. For all the problems that can happen, we’re in a good spot right now.

Noah: 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.

Becca: It was funny to be there for 2024 because that was really the year when what the content team was fundamentally changed from encoding videos to making things.

Noah: 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.

Becca: From someone from the outside looking in, there’s been a noticeable shift from just preserving things, keeping it the way it was, to making it functionally how it used to be, so Wii Room doesn’t just have all the videos from 2012, it’s that Wii Room functionally can do what it used to do in 2012, which was to deliver exclusive content. I think that is a noticeable shift in the direction of WiiLink. Something like Mii Contest Channel too, now actually has contests relevant to what’s happening currently.

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

Becca: I think we got a reply in a recent Bluesky announcement post for the special contests to fix the mail-outs. That’s a good point though, it’s been 5 years and everything is mostly working, but there’s always going to be more things to fix. How do you go about choosing what to do? I’ve seen the amount of Discord pings you get, asking for something from you.

Noah: 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.

_{*Jira - Project management software, used to visualize issues needed addressing.}

Becca: I guess any team members reading this will see this as a call out post.

Noah: 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.

Becca: In the team, who’s been around for long? I don’t think I know much about who was in the team in 2020, 2021.

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

Becca: So did quite a lot of the original team members drop out?

Noah: 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.

Becca: Yeah. It’s a community effort, so the fact that it can still remain even if some team members are gone, like you weren’t originally the team lead, but when the original team lead quit they were able to pass it on.

Noah: 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.

_{*Digicam - Internal name for Photo Prints Channel.}

Becca: That’s true. I think it’ll be very interesting to see where we end up in another 5 years. Hopefully, if we last that long.

Noah: I’m gonna be 24 in another 5 years.

Becca: I’ll be 23.

Noah: That’s crazy.

Becca: I think in 2020, the initial vision of bringing back all the channels, now we have all that but we have another layer of new things and things that went on that I don’t think none of us expected to happen.

Noah: Yeah.

Becca: It is a privileged position to be able to, even now that the Wii’s been dead for 13 years, there’s still things to do and things to look forward to.

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

Becca: I guess in 5 years, we’ll also meet the heat death of the universe*.

_{*Heat death of the universe - Due to how the Wii’s system clock is calculated, it is said to only go up to 2036. If the system date and real life date can’t match, it is said to cause various web functions to malfunction.}

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

Becca: Was it 2035?

Noah: I think December 2036.

Becca: Weird date to end the time on. Well I guess we have 10 years before that. (laughs) For the time being, we can enjoy the development of WiiLink.

Noah: For sure, we do have time.

Becca: If there’s anything you want to say directly to anybody reading this.

Noah: 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.

Becca: To another 5 years.

Thank you, for everything.

Featuring:

Noah Pistilli (Sketch) - [email protected]