Trump’s mug shot was on the Wii News channel, thanks to RiiConnect24 devs

Enlarge / The medium is the message, even within the third-party homebrew restoration of that medium. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

There were few news outlets where former US president Donald J. Trump’s mug shot, from his indictment in Fulton County, Georgia, would not be seen after its Thursday afternoon release.

This included the Nintendo Wii News Channel. If you still have a Wii console hooked up in your living room, you could, with an exploit, an SD card, and some patience, still have an active News Channel on your Wii. If you were checking 2023’s news on your 2006 console Thursday, you could have seen Trump’s image in all its fuzzy, compressed notoriety. This inadvertent performance art was made possible by RiiConnect24, a service that has been providing Wii owners with online connectivity for a longer period than even Nintendo originally offered.

Full disclosure: I am a sincerely soft target for a loosely organized crew of hackers keeping a service running long beyond its corporate end of life. RiiConnect24 certainly falls in that category. Nintendo shut off WiiConnect24 in June 2013, ending the ability to receive forecasts and news, share Mii avatars and messages, participate in the “Everybody Votes Channel,” and use the network aspects of certain games.