GameCube games via WiiWare on Wii U?

Nintendo appears to have confirmed that ageing GameCube games will be made available for download on the Wii U.

Gamers will get the last-gen games via the company's existing WiiWare service, Nintendo of America exec Amber McCollom told NintendoGal.

"GameCube discs will not be compatible with Wii U, but a number of the games that were playable on GameCube can be downloaded from WiiWare," McCollom said.

To date, Nintendo has used the term WiiWare to denote original downloadable games on Wii, while retro games are re-released under the Virtual Console label. Did McCollom misspeak? Or will these GameCube games come with Wii U related extras?

And if GameCube titles are to be made available, does this mean Nintendo are considering a beefier Wii U memory capacity?

Wii owners had to make do with just 512MB of internal memory, although this was expandable via SD cards. It would take double that to cope with just one of the GameCube's 1.4GB mini DVDs that Nintendo fed players with.

With N64, SNES and NES games already available for the Wii, adding GameCube titles would be a logical next step. Indeed, Nintendo has just launched a Virtual Console for the 3DS, which includes Game Boy and Game Boy Color classics.

Eurogamer has contacted Nintendo for confirmation, we'll update when we hear a response.