“Rest assured, you will have it before Christmas.”
I was relieved. I had never been anxious about buying something in advance because I had never done it before. But this time, I had no choice.
To get the Nintendo Wii for my little sister, I had to be aggressive on my buying intent. Determined, I had entered the store on a preorder MISSION.
The Wii. 2006.
Man, it was c r a z y.
I’m not sure I can remember a bigger, worldwide online hype for anything before. Nintendo had done a master class in marketing here. If I remember correctly, they only had had a teaser about the new controller, but basically nothing else. At that time, I was working on a Wii game and a friend was gameplay programmer on it. I had had access to “project Revolution” six months prior to its official sale.
I miss the Wii. I miss its controllers. I miss our collective imagination around what those controllers could do (narrator: sadly, not much). I miss the ability to play with both hands with the width I want.
The core concept –all about gameplay, and to hell with HD- was _very_ refreshing. We just had basically spent 15 years running after the latest tech. More CPUs. More 3D. More esoteric words that don’t mean that the game will be fun. The Wii (and the DS) just dragon punched the hell out of this paradigm.
The music. How my god, the Wii channel and Wii Sports. It was so addicting and so chill. Everything said “just have fun, and relax”.
I had never played video games with my parents before, and I never played video games with my parents after. The Wii was that much of a change. In six years, they sold 100 million of those. This is still Nintendo’s best-selling machine ever and one of the fastest selling tech product ever.
The console was supposed to play older Nintendo games, was going to change how we make games, making games for a broader audience, etc. Unfortunately, those points rapidly fell off the cliff of reality: half-baked features, the Wii being just a little too underpowered for many games that could have been ported to, the buying power of the core 18-30 dudes market. All those variables eventually came back to bite Nintendo in the butt.
But before that? I saw the ocean. I saw it. It was amazing. Thank you, Mr. Iwata (president of Nintendo at the time, who pushed for a broader video game landscape, and passed away in 2015)