The Nintendo Wii, or the console designed for people who don't play consoles
In September 2005, at the Tokyo Game Show in Makuhari Messe, Satoru Iwata walked on stage and held up what looked like a television remote. The gaming press had gathered expecting a spec sheet — processor speeds, polygon counts, the usual arithmetic of power. What they got was a white plastic wand, slightly shorter than a paperback novel, with a small speaker on the face. Nintendo’s codename for the project was Revolution. Iwata didn’t use that word. He just pointed the thing at a screen.
The company had been working toward that moment for four years. Nintendo began a partnership with Gyration Inc., a firm that held key motion-sensing patents, in September 2001 — the same month the GameCube launched in Japan. While Sony and Microsoft were drawing up machines designed to render more polygons faster, Iwata, who had become Nintendo’s president in May 2002, was asking a different question: who wasn’t playing games, and why not? The answer he kept arriving at was the controller. A modern gamepad had two analogue sticks, four face buttons, two triggers, two shoulder buttons, and a d-pad. You needed a working knowledge of all of them before you could make anything happen on screen.
Nintendo unveiled the Wii — the name, explained as a pun on “we” to suggest a console for everyone, was announced in April 2006 — at $249.99 on November 19, 2006, in North America. Every unit in most regions came bundled with Wii Sports: five games — tennis, bowling, golf, boxing, baseball. Each required exactly one gesture to understand. Swing the remote like a bat. Roll your arm like a bowler. Punch. The instruction was in the motion.
The console sold out within minutes wherever it was stocked and remained scarce at retail for more than a year. Nintendo’s supply chain, built for a niche gaming audience, had not prepared for everyone.
What nobody had quite predicted was the geography of uptake. Physical therapists adopted Wii Sports for rehabilitation. Retirement homes across North America organized Wii bowling leagues. The National Senior League formalized a competition spanning more than 180 teams from California to New York, with over a thousand entrants turning up in team uniforms. The average age of those bowlers was nowhere near fifteen. The game had become medical equipment.
Nintendo had aimed to expand the gaming population; they managed that, and then some. The Wii finished its production run in 2013 having sold 101.63 million units, making it the best-selling home console of its generation. Wii Sports alone moved 82.9 million copies — the best-selling single game title in history at the time.
The Wii Remote pointed a direction the whole industry eventually followed. Sony added motion controls with the Move. Microsoft deployed the Kinect. Apple built its phone around gesture. The logic was the same in all of them: the interface should disappear into the action, and you should forget you’re holding a device.
The real revolution wasn’t the hardware. It was the acknowledgment that the people who weren’t playing games yet outnumbered the ones who were, and that they were worth designing for.
Sources
- Wii — Wikipedia — codename Revolution, Gyration Inc. partnership, April 2006 naming, launch dates, sales figures.
- Nintendo Wii Release Date, Specs & History — Video Game Console Library — Wii Sports bundling, blue ocean strategy, retail shortages, launch pricing.
- Who’s Gaming Now: Seniors Turn to Wii Bowling — NPR — National Senior League competition, retirement home adoption details.