We are gathered here today to mourn the fact that we’ll likely never see a video game like Wii Sports again. It had families playing baseball together. It had fathers golfing with their children. It had grandmothers taking to the ring to punch every one of their descendants in the nunchucks. What a time it was to be alive.
The Nintendo Wii is one of the best-selling consoles of all time, being one of the few with over 100 million units sold, and you could feel it. It seemed like most households had a Nintendo Wii, as gamers and non-gamer families alike were eager to pick one up for its party games. I remember Christmas gatherings where everyone would jump on Wii games, which I loved since I was usually the only family member to actively play games otherwise.
But Wii Sports was the Nintendo Wii game. In some ways, it was the video game, period.
It Was All About Fun, Pure And Simple
The biggest selling point of Wii Sports was the lack of a selling point. The game was bundled in a lovely little cardboard sleeve with the Nintendo Wii when you bought it, meaning that as soon as you owned the Nintendo Wii, you owned Wii Sports. It was almost definitely the first game you ever played on the console.
Paired with the fact that the Nintendo Wii wasn’t a console designed to target a specific generation of gamers or compete with any specific hardware, and was instead supposed to be something simple and easy to use, Wii Sports was accessible to pretty much anyone. The Wii U complicated things and had a weaker start, while the Switch 2’s focus on more powerful hardware led to mixed receptions, despite incredibly successful sales.
Just pick up the TV remote-like controller, and try your hand at simulated golf, tennis, baseball, bowling, or boxing – that was all there was to it. The Wii Motion Plus was a cool way to increase the controller’s functionality later on, and Wii Sports Resort is an equally brilliant game that made use of that, but it wasn’t equally successful. It didn’t have the simplicity of Wii Sports, nor the assured ownership.
For An Exclusive, This Was A Big Deal
There have been plenty of games that sweep the world, finding themselves in the possession of gamers of all types. You’ll find casual experiences like Pokemon Go on the phones of old ladies and hardcore Pokefans alike, and traditional games like Fortnite and Minecraft are available on damn near everything. But Wii Sports was just a game on the Wii, in a time when gaming was less omnipresent than it is now.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was pretty universal, but when a modern global audience is forced to stay indoors, that’s not a surprise.
Sometimes, it just feels like Wii Sports was an anomaly. A pocket of time where a seemingly unremarkable game was remarkable in every way. Everyone knows Mario. Everyone knows Minecraft. But back in the forgotten days of 2006, everyone knew Wii Sports. There was no story, no characters, no competition, and no pre-determined demographic. It just was. There’ll never be another game that’s so universally beloved.
Wii Sports
- Released
-
November 19, 2006
- ESRB
-
E For Everyone due to Mild Violence
- Developer(s)
-
Nintendo EAD
- Publisher(s)
-
Nintendo
- Multiplayer
-
Online Multiplayer