How the Nintendo Wii's remote control changed gaming — one strike at a time

With a television remote-style controller that tracked the motion of a player's hands in real time, the Nintendo Wii was unlike any console before it.

Designed to get players moving their body, players could swing a virtual tennis racket or bowl a strike — and its simple controls meant anyone could pick it up.

Competing with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360, the Wii — released on this day in 2006 — was never a powerhouse when it came to graphics, but the cultural impacts were incredibly broad, selling 101 million consoles over its lifetime.

Mitchell McEwan, course director for game design and development at Macquarie University, said Nintendo targeted new people in the household rather than just kids and existing gamers.

"The Wii was really designed from the bottom up to be accessible and so they made the main controller for that, the Wii remote to look like a remote control, something that people would have interacted with their TVs," McEwan said. 

"Socially, Wii Sports got a lot of people to experiencing games for the first time, visiting family for Christmas for example and a whole bunch of people that had never played games before started to play them."

Wii Sports included tennis, golf, baseball, bowling and boxing mini-games, where players moved the controller in ways that mimicked the actions in the real sports. 

Former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé said that he pushed to include Wii Sports with every system sold in Australia, Europe and the United States as it immediately taught players what the console could do.

Retelling the story in his memoir, Fils-Aimé said that he initially faced resistance from both Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and legendary Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who thought giving away their games devalued them.

"The goal of Wii is to expand gaming from its current niche to a mass-market medium," he said.

"'Wii Sports has the power to do this and can be a unifying element for all players of the system and be a key motivation for people to buy the system and have fun immediately."

A role beyond games

Unlike other consoles, the Wii also became a useful tool in rehabilitation. 

A program developed by Neuroscience Research Australia used the Wii as part of a two-week intensive rehabilitation program. Dr Penelope McNulty said at the time that playing the game showed some big improvements.

"So we see bigger movements, faster movements, more dexterity in the end. But we also see improved balance, walking; the patients get fitter, which is really important, and we're also seeing some psychological benefit."

So valuable was the console in 2013 that the researchers called on players to donate their older machines.

Legacy that lives on

While the Wii would be one of Nintendo's most successful consoles, its immediate follow-up, the confusingly named Wii U, launched in 2012, represented one of the worst disasters in the company's history.

Targeting a more core gaming audience this time, the Wii U had a controller with a built-in screen, which allowed players to move their game from the TV  to the couch.

Existing Wii players found little reason to upgrade to the next model, which sold only 13 million consoles.

But the innovation wasn't lost — much of it was incorporated in the Nintendo Switch, a portable console that could be attached to a TV.  That has sold 154 million devices to date.

McEwan says that the legacy of Wii lives on, particularly through its pioneering motion controls.

"PlayStation continued to have motion controls and still has motion controls built into their main controller for their platform. Nintendo obviously continues to do that as well," he says.

"A lot of what was learned in terms of how to integrate these technologies [into games] and how to leverage them for a better user experience was applied to VR technology as well."