Wii

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 19th of November 2006, Nintendo launched a home console that came bundled with a controller shaped like a television remote. Players swung it through the air to bowl, to swing a tennis racket, to cast a fishing line. Grandparents picked it up. Retirement homes bought it. A machine designed for everyone ended up on the shelves of hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and nursing facilities. The Wii sold over 101 million units in its lifetime, making it Nintendo's best-selling home console for fifteen years. But the story of how it got there is not a simple tale of a company outsmarting its rivals. It is a story of a company that had lost its footing, of a president who bet everything on a radically different idea, and of a tiny white wedge that changed who video games were for. What drove Nintendo to abandon the arms race of processing power? Who pushed the motion control idea from patent sketches into living rooms? And what happened when the world Nintendo built began to slip away?

• 2. A Company Off Course

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  Satoru Iwata succeeded Hiroshi Yamauchi as Nintendo president in May 2002, and he arrived at a company that had fallen behind. Online gaming had grown into a meaningful market, and Nintendo had largely missed it. Internal research revealed another problem: the company's habit of building unusual hardware had made it harder for outside developers to support Nintendo platforms, weakening the competitive position of every console Nintendo shipped.

  Iwata's response was methodical. He launched the Nintendo DS, a dual-screen handheld with a touchscreen, as a way to revitalize the handheld line and prove that unconventional hardware could succeed. The DS worked. Players who had never considered a handheld bought one. Nintendo watched the data closely. Designer Ken'ichiro Ashida later recalled, "We had the DS on our minds as we worked on the Wii. We thought about copying the DS's touch-panel interface and even came up with a prototype." The team ultimately set that idea aside to avoid overlap between the two products.

  Miyamoto later put the stakes plainly: "If the DS had flopped, we might have taken the Wii back to the drawing board." The DS had not flopped. That success gave Nintendo the confidence to go further.

• 3. Building the Revolution

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  In 2003, Iwata sat down with Shigeru Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda and gave the project its guiding instruction. He told Takeda to "go off the tech roadmap." The new console needed to be accessible to non-traditional players, including mothers. It needed to reduce household clutter by playing older Nintendo games. And it had to avoid the trap of competing on raw processing power with Sony and Microsoft.

  Nintendo had been laying groundwork since the 24th of September 2001, when it began collaborating with Gyration Inc., a company holding several patents in motion-sensing technology. The goal was to prototype motion-based input using those patents. Takeda led hardware development. Miyamoto took on the controller, drawing on Gyration's motion-sensing work to design something new. An initial prototype was completed within six months of the 2003 meeting.

  The project ran under the internal codename "GameCube Next" before Iwata rebranded it "Revolution" at E3 2004, a name he chose to signal his belief that the console would change the industry. In September 2005, Iwata demonstrated a prototype of the controller at the Tokyo Game Show. Developers who had tested it, including Hideo Kojima and Yuji Horii, gave commentary in a video supporting the presentation, both expressing belief that the controller would draw people in.

  Miyamoto described his original cost ambition in a single sentence: "I wanted a machine that would cost $100. My idea was to spend nothing on the console technology so all the money could be spent on improving the interface and software." The final processor, named Broadway, was a 32-bit IBM chip running at 729 MHz; the total system memory came to 88 MB. By the standards of the seventh generation, the hardware was modest. That was the plan.

• 4. The Name Nobody Liked

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  The console's official name, "Wii," was announced in April 2006, a month ahead of E3. The stylized spelling used two lowercase letters "i" to represent both two people standing side by side and the pairing of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. Nintendo's announcement explained the reasoning directly: "Wii sounds like 'we', which emphasizes that the console is for everyone. Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion."

  The reaction was swift and largely hostile. Forbes reported that fans feared the name would reinforce the perception that Nintendo made consoles for children. The day after the announcement, BBC News reported that a long list of jokes based on the name had spread across the internet. Developers and journalists voiced a preference for "Revolution." Reggie Fils-Aimé, president of Nintendo of America, defended the decision directly, stating that Nintendo chose "Wii" over "Revolution" because they wanted something short, distinctive, and easily pronounceable across all languages and cultures.

  The mockery faded quickly once players actually held the controller. At E3 2006, the Wii was available for press demonstrations, and the experience of swinging the remote overwhelmed any debate about the name. The console won the Game Critics Award for Best of Show and Best Hardware at that event.

• 5. Launch and Shortage

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  Nintendo launched the Wii in the United States on the 19th of November 2006, priced at a point notably below both the Xbox 360 and the two models of PlayStation 3. Japan followed on December 2, Australasia on December 7, and the United Kingdom on December 8 at a price of the equivalent of €249.99 across most of Europe. Nintendo's North American launch campaign was directed by Academy Award winner Stephen Gaghan, and it targeted parents and grandparents rather than the core gaming audience.

  The launch was the largest console launch by Nintendo in the Americas, Japan, Europe, and Australia. The company had shipped nearly 3.2 million units worldwide by the end of 2006. It was not enough. The Wii remained in short supply through its entire first year, and Nintendo warned consumers that shortages would persist into 2007. To address demand, the company increased production from 1.6 million to around 2.4 million units per month during 2008.

  Wii Sports, the game bundled with the console in most regions, became the machine's defining product. It sold over 82 million copies including pack-in units, and it pulled in players who had never bought a video game in their lives. By September 2007, Wii sales had surpassed those of the Xbox 360. Within a year of launch, the Wii was the best-selling console of its entire generation.

  Analyst Soichiro Fukuda of Nikko Citigroup estimated that in 2007, Nintendo was earning a profit from each unit sold, a meaningful contrast to both Sony and Microsoft, who were selling hardware at a loss and recovering through software sales.

• 6. What the Remote Could Do

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  The Wii Remote contained a MEMS-based three-dimensional accelerometer and infrared detection sensors at the far end of the unit. A Sensor Bar placed above or below the television emitted infrared light from LEDs, which the remote tracked to determine its orientation toward the screen, functioning as a pointing device with an accurate range of roughly 15 feet. The accelerometer measured how the remote moved from a resting position and translated that into gesture recognition.

  The bowling game in Wii Sports made the system concrete: the Wii Remote could track a player's arm and wrist rotation and apply that as speed and spin to a virtual ball. The remote connected to the console via Bluetooth with a range of roughly 30 feet, and up to four could connect to a single Wii. It included a small internal speaker and a rumble pack that fed physical feedback directly to the player's hand.

  In December 2006, Nintendo recalled the original wrist straps after reports of the remote slipping from players' hands and damaging television screens and windows. A stronger strap was issued as a free replacement. In October 2007, Nintendo added a silicone Wii Remote Jacket to new shipments and offered it free to existing owners, wrapping the remote's body in a material that improved grip while leaving buttons and connectors accessible.

  The MotionPlus accessory, released in June 2009, added gyroscopes to the existing sensors, enabling finer detection of rotation and subtle movement. The first product to bundle it was Wii Sports Resort. That gyroscopic technology was later folded directly into the Wii Remote Plus, first released in October 2010.

• 7. Beyond Games

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  Takashi Aoyama of Nintendo's Integrated Research and Development Division led the team that designed the Wii Menu. The team called the project the "Console Feature Realization Project," and their central question was what the Wii interface could show in a low-power, around-the-clock mode that would be interesting to someone who was not actively playing a game. Testing pointed to weather and news updates. The visual metaphor they settled on was a row of televisions in an electronics shop, each tuned to a different channel. That metaphor became the channel grid that defined the Wii's home screen.

  The Wii was Nintendo's first home console with native internet connectivity. Third-party streaming applications expanded the console's reach well past gaming: the BBC iPlayer arrived in November 2009, Netflix in November 2010, Hulu in February 2012, YouTube in December 2012, Amazon Prime Video in January 2013, and Crunchyroll in October 2015.

  In May 2010, Nintendo gave the American Heart Association a $1.5 million gift. The AHA responded by endorsing the Wii with its Healthy Heart Check icon, covering the console itself and the two active titles Wii Fit Plus and Wii Sports Resort. Research published in the British Medical Journal found that Wii play burned more energy than sedentary games, though it was not a substitute for regular exercise. The Wii's rehabilitation applications were studied across stroke, cerebral palsy, Parkinson's disease, and balance training.

  Satoru Iwata had described his goal as creating "quality of life" products. The Wii Balance Board, released alongside Wii Fit in December 2007, measured a player's center of balance through pressure sensors. Nintendo developed a further device, a "Vitality Sensor" that measured pulse, and presented it at E3 2009. Internal testing found it did not work consistently across all users, and the product never shipped. Iwata confirmed in a 2013 Q&A that the Vitality Sensor had been shelved entirely.

• 8. Decline and Lasting Mark

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  Wii sales fell 21 percent in 2010, then roughly in half again in 2012. The PlayStation Move and Kinect had arrived on competing platforms, and the novelty of motion control no longer belonged to Nintendo alone. Third-party publishers, already frustrated by the platform's non-standard development tools, shifted attention toward the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and personal computers. Nintendo discontinued the Wii in October 2013. The WiiConnect24 service closed in June 2013. Online multiplayer through Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection ended in May 2014. The Wii Shop Channel shut down in January 2019.

  The Wii U, released in North America on the 18th of November 2012, was designed to win back the audience that had felt alienated by the Wii's casual positioning. It featured 1080p graphics and a touchscreen controller. It failed commercially, partly because Nintendo had abandoned the differentiated approach that had made the Wii succeed, by which point Sony and Microsoft had developed comparable motion features of their own.

  Joe Skrebels of IGN argued that the Wii's most durable legacy is its music. The channel themes composed by Kazumi Totaka for the console's menu system spread far past the machine itself. The Washington Post described the Mii Channel music as "a cultural touchstone." Martin Robinson of Eurogamer called the Wii Shop Channel theme "a song so infectious it went on to become a meme." Both tracks have inspired jazz covers and accumulated millions of plays on social video platforms.

  Ubisoft released Just Dance games for the Wii through Just Dance 2020, a title released in 2019. Vblank Entertainment released Shakedown: Hawaii and Retro City Rampage DX on the 9th of July 2020, more than thirteen years after the console's launch. Nine Wii games sold more than ten million copies each, with Mario Kart Wii reaching 37.38 million units and Wii Sports Resort reaching 33.14 million. Total game sales for the platform reached 921.85 million units by the 30th of June 2022.