They found the Queen’s golden Wii!

THQ marketing was a real piece of work. The king-size purple dildos. The pornstars. The bikini car washes. The formation of North Korean conscripts marching through L.A. at E3 2010 and the balloon launch that ended up in San Francisco Bay. You name it, they kept it crassy.

Even the stuff that dribbled out of THQ’s shovelware faucet got the treatment. Tasked with hyping 2009’s Big Family Games (no Metacritic score, 45 percent on Game Rankings) someone cooked up the idea to electroplate a Wii and send it to Queen Elizabeth II (the person, not the ship). And of course, back in bloggier times we (the games press) took the bait. Tacky gold-plated consoles were a sure way to hit your Crecente-mandated 37 posts for the day and move on to something more important, like whatever Uwe Boll was doing.

Chris Bratt, formerly of Eurogamer, remembers the time well. Bratt also remembers the Royal Wii (snicker) and set off to discover its fate for his excellent (and Patreon-supported) series People Make Games. He immediately points out that the Queen’s official correspondence team will not accept gifts, for obvious reasons of security. So he can cross Buckingham Palace off the list of final resting places. In fact, the thing was simply sent back to THQ, unsigned-for and unopened.

But, as we all know, THQ’s bankruptcy in 2013 forced the company to sell all of its valuable assets, and Homefront. So the console isn’t in that office, either. The long story short, Bratt does find the golden Wii. But who has it, and what else he has, makes for some entertaining viewing and nostalgia on a Saturday afternoon.

And now, with that resolved, perhaps Bratt can get around to finding out what really happened to that missing shipment of king-size purple dildos.