Splatoon And Mario Kart 8 Online Services On Wii U Are Finally Coming Back

EDIT: Nintendo of America have also officially tweeted about Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 getting Wii U online play back in their region. The systems were made available again by August 2, 2023, 9 AM PT, so if you have a US region Wii U, you should be able to play these games online yourself, after a system update.

The original story follows below.

Nintendo UK has revealed that online services for Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 are returning to the Wii U after nearly half a year of outages.

Last March, Nintendo revealed that those online services would be getting shut down, because an exploit had hit the Wii U’s online services called ENLBufferPwn.

Yours truly experiences some of the consequences of the exploit, when I joined a Splatoon match earlier this year. At the start of that match, one team already had all of their ink dominating the map. I happened to be on the winning team, and noted that as I played the other team couldn’t kill us. The only thing the other team could do was spray their paint, but even the exploit added one last cheat that guaranteed we would get 100 % of the map, and win the match.

As reported by Video Games Chronicle, the way ENLBufferPwn works is that as soon as you connect to other Wii U players online, you would be able to take over the other players’ console and exploit code on it.

It should be noted that it was quite strange for hackers to go after a console that had long stopped being sold and manufactured. Comparably, nobody ever tried pulling a similar exploit on the PlayStation 3’s and the Vita’s online services, even if Sony had committed to keeping their stores and other services online after fan demand.

This was how Nintendo UK explained the outage on their official support page on the issue:

“In March 2023, Nintendo paused network services for the Wii U games Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 to address a vulnerability related to online play. The issue has now been fixed, and so we will resume online play for these games based on the schedule below. Please accept our sincere apologies for the extended waiting period.”

Nintendo UK explains that Wii U owners will have to download a new update to get those online services up and running on their consoles again. That update should be available starting tomorrow, August 2, 2023. Nintendo UK makes their announcements separate from other branches, but presumably, Nintendo of America, Nintendo Co Ltd, and Nintendo Europe will make similar announcements in the coming days, if not hours.

Those players who still play their old consoles understand that just because most gamers have moved on to newer platforms, doesn’t mean that nobody is playing on those old consoles anymore. Hopefully, those fans who do have the nostalgia and desire to relive those old days can continue to play their consoles as they want them in the future.