What happened to Wing Island?

Hudson’s surprise pre E3 announcement was that they were working on an unnamed “flight sim”. Nintendo fans hoped the game was a sequel to Pilotwings, but eventually the mystery title was revealed as a new property for Hudson. Wing Island uses the Wii remote as a flight yoke to pilot a group of planes. If you tilt the remote up the planes will rise and tilting the remote down causes the planes to descend. It’s a simple set up to understand and since Wing Island is the sole flying game on the Wii in Japan it should have sold decently. Instead Wing Island sold only 800 copies on the Wii’s launch weekend, meaning that only 2% of the people that bought a Wii were interested in Wing Island. Ouch. Now what if Wing Island was marketed as Pilotwings would it sell more copies?