Wii

The Wii is a home video game console from Nintendo, released on November 19, 2006, in North America and worldwide that December. It's Nintendo's fifth major home console, following the GameCube, and sits in the seventh generation alongside the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Instead of chasing raw power, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata aimed to attract a broader audience with innovative play. Shigeru Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda led the design, initially codenamed Revolution. The key was the Wii Remote, a wireless controller with motion tracking that could detect gestures and act as a pointer. This was also Nintendo's first console with built-in internet, enabling online play and downloads through the Wii Shop Channel, plus wireless link-ups with the Nintendo DS. Early models played GameCube games and used its accessories, but later revisions like the RVL-101 and the Wii Mini stripped those features.

Because the hardware was less demanding, games were cheaper to make than on rival systems. The console flew off shelves, with shortages in several markets. The bundled Wii Sports became an instant hit, while new Super Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and Pokémon titles kept momentum going. Within a year, the Wii was the best-selling console of its generation, a social phenomenon in many living rooms. Lifetime sales topped 101 million units, making it the seventh best-selling console ever as of April 2026, and Nintendo's second-best home console after the Switch passed it in 2021. Production ended in October 2013, though the Wii Mini lingered a bit longer, and some third-party online services stayed up until 2019.

The Wii turned Nintendo back into a major player by pulling in people who had never touched a console before. Its motion controls pushed Microsoft and Sony to respond with Kinect and PlayStation Move. But the focus on casual fun also turned off some core gamers. The successor, the Wii U, launched in 2012, tried to win back that hardcore crowd but flopped, becoming Nintendo's worst-selling home console. [edit]

The Wii's core innovation was its motion-sensing control scheme. The Wii Remote, often called the Wiimote, used accelerometers and an infrared sensor bar to track movement in three-dimensional space. This allowed players to swing the controller like a tennis racket, golf club, or sword, creating a physical, embodied gaming experience that had never been mainstream before. The controller also featured a pointer function, allowing players to aim at the screen like a laser pointer for menu navigation and shooting games.

The bundled game Wii Sports became the console's flagship title, demonstrating the motion controls through five sports simulations, tennis, baseball, bowling, golf, and boxing, that anyone could pick up and play within minutes. This accessibility was central to Nintendo's strategy, as Miyamoto later explained that the company designed the DS and Wii specifically to normalize being a gamer, drawing a comparison that society does not distinguish between book readers and non-book readers. Iwata had previously attributed the GameCube's poor sales to the public's perception of gaming as a niche activity, and the Wii was the direct response to that problem.

The Wii Fit phenomenon, launched with the Wii Balance Board accessory, turned exercise into a gaming activity and became a cultural touchstone. However, the Balance Board was also among the accessories that some owners disliked, alongside other peripherals like the Wii Zapper. The Classic Controller Pro, meanwhile, was widely loved for providing a traditional control option for Virtual Console games and certain third-party titles. [edit]