You know when a plane in a movie falls into an irrecoverable dive, the rocks rising up to meet it, the collision inevitable, the pilot’s eyes locked wide open - but then, somehow, it pulls up at the last second? For you that image might call to mind Goldeneye; for me, a person so British as to make parody impossible, it’s Wallace and Gromit. The point is, it’s the same satisfying trajectory Nintendo fans have witnessed in the two years since the Switch came out.

The extraordinary success of the Switch has been all the more exhilarating for the downward momentum Nintendo had accrued during the Wii U years. For a single company to be responsible for both a console cycle’s most disastrous machinery failure and its soaring surprise recovery? It’s nothing less than the stuff of cinema, if movies were made about game company financials. And in a world where The Big Short wins an Oscar, maybe they will. But the truth is more complex. In fact, everything that has made the Switch the console of a generation was birthed, rather clumsily, by its predecessor.

Loading

“ The extraordinary success of the Switch has been all the more exhilarating for the downward momentum Nintendo had accrued during the Wii U years.

Loading

Loading

“ The Wii U became a genuine home to multi-platform action games.

You’d be forgiven for not seeing it. During the Wii U’s frankly weird E3 reveal, Reggie Fils-Aimé played on the ‘We’ of the title, promising the console could “change the way you interact with your family and friends”. From the off, it was sold as a second-screen based console for the living room - a concept families could never quite wrap their heads around, if they’d even worked out that the Wii U was a brand new console in the first place.The only moment in the announcement trailers that resembled the Wii U’s actual appeal was the one in which a dad commandeered the telly to watch baseball - and his wholesomely-voiced son shifted the action of New Super Mario Bros. U to the gamepad instead. Diehard fans soon discovered it was best to ditch the TV entirely, throwing the console under a side table and kicking back in bed with Mario Kart 8. As it turned out, this wasn’t the most social gaming machine ever made, but the opposite - an isolationist dream, making home console games handheld for the first time. So long as you never traveled more than 26-and-a-quarter feet from your home and, frankly, why would you when you could rack up 10,000 miles on Rainbow Road without moving an inch?Yes, the Wii U might bear a resemblance to a reinforced laptop designed for toddlers or warzones, its 6.2 inches of screen encased in enough plastic that you could eat a TV dinner off it as you played. But it was the place where the Switch’s dominant new console playstyle quietly began, encouraging you to don a pair of headphones and settle in with the gamepad like a good book. Just as the handheld market was being declared dead, the Wii U had fulfilled on the promise the PSP and Vita arrived too early to deliver - uncompromised home console games on a device you could bury your head in and let the world go by.It’s not just the hardware, either. The dioramic masterpiece currently making best use of the Switch’s tactile place between your hands, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, comes directly from the Wii U. In Captain Toad, a hybrid platformer and puzzle game, you explore tiny levels the way a worm navigates an apple - dipping in and out of holes as you work out your route to the exit. Indies are now following suit, as in Bad North, a defensive RTS in which you spin your perspective around the axis of a Scandinavian island with your fingers.Where the instinct of developers on home consoles has traditionally been to build worlds that expand in every direction, the Wii U and now the Switch look inward, celebrating the intimate. Yoshi’s Woolly World presented a knitted landscape littered with sewing buttons and needles that suggested a scale barely larger than the gamepad screen. Yoshi's Crafted World, out this month on the Switch, doubles down with cardboard castles and crocodiles made from tissue boxes. The Nintendo-published puzzle game, Snipperclips, plays out against the backdrop of a piece of graph paper, with rulers and pencils marking the boundaries of the levels. And in the indie Gorogoa, you manipulate beautifully illustrated panels as if inside a comic. In that pocket-sized context, it’s no surprise that the Lego games found natural homes on both the Switch and the Wii U.Even the flagship open world that connects both consoles, Breath of the Wild, is anchored by the Sheikah Slate - an in-game analogue to the gamepad that can be used as a scope, just as the gamepad was in the Wii U’s first trailer. It’s a touch that makes you conscious of the device in your hands.All that remains is for Nintendo to put together that Captain Toad snow globe DLC I’ve been pitching through a megaphone in Kyoto every Christmas break for the past five years. It’s like I bellowed to Shuntaro Furukawa as he walked to his car: think about the scale. It just makes sense.In other words: the Switch was there, all along. You might not have been able to spot it, buried as it was beneath light guns, styluses, and the unreasonable expectations of the Wii era. But squint a bit, and you can see what was coming next - the bedroom console for one with a catalogue to rival any of its peers. Nintendo was always going to fall off the balance board. We should be grateful that in doing so, it tripped over the blueprint for something genuinely new and magical.

Jeremy Peel is a freelance journalist and friend to anyone who will look at photos of his dogs. You can follow him on Twitter @jeremy_peel.