For the first 11 months of 2006, Nintendo’s weird new little console was the butt of every gaming joke, a tiny white flag waved in the company’s ongoing war to be taken seriously. Even without belaboring the obvious (i.e., that its carefully chosen name, with the two i’s meant to represent two gamers playing together, was also homophonous with Baby’s First Synonym For Piss), the box Nintendo was showing at press events was both deliberately tiny and deliberately underpowered, the latter as part of a very clear effort to keep costs down. (A long-held Nintendo design principle that would now be running straight into the pitfalls of the forthcoming HD era, which the Wii would basically be opting out of.)
Most bafflingly, it was going to launch with a huge focus on motion controls, a design scheme that had previously been relegated to arcade fads and occasional crap peripherals like Sega’s much-ridiculed “try to control a fighting game by accidentally kicking your television” Activator system. Everyone in 2006 knew that motion controls were a gimmick, at best—and they kept right on knowing it until November 19, when Wii Sports launched with the console, and blew that preconceived notion away like so many rapidly flailing arms trying to smack an incoming virtual tennis ball.
Unlike the console’s Wiimote controller (which anecdotally got accidentally hurled at a lot of endangered TVs, to the point that Nintendo eventually had to send out better wrist straps for it), the genius of Katsuya Eguchi’s sports anthology wasn’t difficult to grasp. Indeed, it played out in millions of living rooms across the United States during the holiday season of 2006, as gamers were able to hand the remote controls to parents, grandparents, younger siblings, weird uncles, distant cousins, baffled wine aunts, and more, and, instead of having to feel their souls evaporate out of their bodies while trying to explain the difference between an R1 and an R2 or the intricacies of dual-stick camera controls, could simply say “You just swing it.” And not only did this simple and intuitive control scheme work, it worked enthusiastically: Powered by a sensor bar and an in-remote accelerometer, the Wiimote could do a shockingly good job keeping track of arm movements and speeds—at least, for the simplified sports games Eguchi and his crew had cooked up. Sure, some of these games had to be a bit lobotomized, most notably baseball and tennis, which had pesky little notions like “moving your characters” handed off to the computer so that players could focus solely on their swing. But there was something genuinely magical about watching the gaming gene click on in somebody’s DNA the first time they “rolled” a bowling ball, and saw their dopey little in-game avatars mimic their efforts, hurling a successful strike.
Was Wii Sports a good video game, by the standards of other video games? Arguable; there’s a reason its most robust simulations, golf and boxing, were typically the least-played. (Also, it was a pain to remember where you’d shoved that damn nunchuck attachment required to play the latter.) But that was also kind of the point: Wii Sports wasn’t operating in comparison to other video games, because the large majority of people falling in love with it would never play those other titles. Quick to pick up, a bit silly, but with just enough rigor that you could get genuinely good at it, the game was simply fun in and of itself, to the point that there are still anecdotal stories about communities of non-“gamers” getting together from time to time to play tennis or hold bowling tournaments with cherished and preserved Wiis. (When a recent season of Hulu’s Paradise revealed that one of its more deranged characters was motivated in part by getting her hands on one of the last Wiis left in a post-apocalyptic world, we could only nod our heads in grim understanding.)
Wii Sports was, in other words, the ultimate sales pitch for itself: It was ridiculously easy to bring a Wii over to someone else’s house, get it plugged in, fire up the game, and almost instantly create another convert. Which makes it kind of wild to consider that this greatest of pack-in games almost wasn’t. In his 2022 memoir Disrupting The Game, former Nintendo Of America president/Bigfoot Pizza creator Reggie Fils-Aimé revealed that he’d had to push his Japanese bosses hard for the game to be included in the Wii’s North American launch package, after company president Satoru Iwata had reportedly told him “Nintendo does not give away precious content for free.” Nintendo corporate ultimately relented, to the tune of moving more than 80 million units—although Japanese players still had to buy the precious content separately.
A few years down the line, the singular genius of Wii Sports would prove to be a problem for Nintendo. If you wanted to be seriously into gaming in the mid-2000s, you couldn’t just own a Wii, unfortunately; it had to be supplemental to a gaming PC, or an Xbox 360, or Sony’s PlayStation 3, which launched within days of the Wii’s own arrival. High-end games just wouldn’t run well enough on the much weaker box for anyone who cared about the concept to stay properly “current.” At the same time, if you were a video game developer that wasn’t Nintendo, you were at a serious disadvantage when it came to trying to make your own Wii efforts: Although Sony and Microsoft both tried to race into the motion control space once it was clear Nintendo was kicking their asses with years-old hardware it had bought off the rack, it was rare for third-party developers to be able to put a Wii game on any other consoles without having to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. (Which is at least partially why we collectively live in a fallen world where there aren’t nearly enough Boom Blox games.)
The combined result of all this was to ensure that Wii Sports would not, ultimately, be gaming’s future, so much as it was a strange, if beautiful, tributary, a more robust and technologically advanced version of “casual” gaming that would reign supreme for a few years, before a glut of smartphone games arrived to wash it all away. In its time, though, there was nothing quite like it: The feeling of putting that goofy remote in a loved one’s hand and seeing the joy of gaming come to life in their eyes, arms enthusiastically swinging as they tried to bat an invisible baseball away. It was the same spark that once flashed to life in all those “non-gamers” exposed to Tetris on the Game Boy, and it represents a lot more than just an extraordinary marketing move to sell video game consoles. Play is fundamental, something that modern games often work too hard to obscure. The instant, elemental success of Wii Sports was a reminder of how easily that notion can reach people when you get all the distractions out of the way, and just let them take a few big swings.
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