 "Photo: Live Nintendo")
I admit it: I predicted very bad things for Nintendo when they showed me their Wii. I was wrong. Now, let's step back and understand the context.
Nintendo is a video game company that led the industry through the '80s and into the mid-'90s until they broke off a working partnership with Sony, which took the work they'd done with the Big N and created its Playstation console. That event was the beginning of Nintendo's fall from grace. After the split, Nintendo lost its standing as the best-selling, most popular gaming company in the world to the Playstation, and Sony's grip tightened on the market with the Playstation 2. Then Microsoft came into the business with their XBOX console and, despite every prediction of failure for their machine, they managed to knock Nintendo and their "next generation" machine down.
Sony had the PS2; Microsoft had the XBOX; Nintendo had the "Gamecube," which was a purple box significantly weaker than the other systems, both in practice and at the cash registers. Nintendo sunk and, were it not for their never-scratched handheld business, they'd have lost relevance in video games. Even with their strong presence in handheld gaming, people predicted that Nintendo would need to "own up to the times" with its next console and match the engineering prowess of Sony and Microsoft.
Those two companies decided to unveil the Playstation III and the XBOX 360, which were mechanical monsters capable of powering third world countries. Nintendo code-named their console "Revolution," but I didn't think so when I saw it.
"They've got nothing," I thought of their machine, which was a small, sleek device with good graphics but not much raw horsepower. Worse, it was a gimmick! Surely you've heard by now about its control?
Yes, the thing that makes it special is its control, modeled after a television remote with a sensor bar so that you can control the actions of the characters by waving your arm. Oh, did that make me angry. "What is Nintendo doing? Do they think video gamers are children? Are they crazy? Stupid? Deaf, blind, or dumb? Which is it?"
You've got to understand where I was coming from. I loved Nintendo. I grew up with Nintendo, and while I didn't play all that much anymore, I still wanted them to "win" and succeed. Yet they were unveiling a "Wii" to the world, refusing to play by the rules dictated by society and expecting to survive. These guys must be suicidal. They must not care about success anymore, they've gone mad! They've taken themselves off a cliff by insisting, "if I am to die, I will die on my own terms." I was sure they were ready to fall on their Wii and be impaled by it. Yeah, I was down on their machine and told everyone I met, "This is going to be their undoing." I was sure.
Then the Wii commercials and videos came out, depicting people playing the Wii, all happy; people writing about playing the Wii, all happy; people watching people play the Wii, all happy.
"It's just advertising, nobody likes it that much," I said to myself, but it did look interesting. Then Nintendo unveiled its price, and it was much lower than the 360 or PS3; then Nintendo unveiled their videogames, and let "The Legend of Zelda" loose on the video-gaming world; then Nintendo's hatchet man promised that Nintendo would never back down against the Evil Empires.
Reggie Fils-Aime, you see, was a man they had hired to revamp their North American public relations in 2004. "My name is Reggie. I'm about kickin' ass, I'm about takin' names, and we're about makin' games." He really said that, at his first E3, the biggest videogame conference in the world. My heart must've skipped a beat when he'd said it back in '04, but I didn't believe it; then the Wii was unleashed, and guess what? It sold well; it was reviewed well. It wasn't a fluke or an advertisement. It was a revolution.
As I alluded to earlier, I don't play videogames all that much anymore, besides my old Super Nintendo sometimes. But I was mentoring my favorite cousin recently, and we were playing the Wii together. I smiled because I was having fun. I smiled because he was having fun. And then I thought about my smile, which is an adventure of itself ("Why am I smiling? What, specifically, is making me happy?"). I realized that I was smiling because there is still room out there in this world for people to do it their way. Haven't you heard? Nintendo's Wii is the best-selling next-generation console, and it's pretty good, too.
That's enough to provide a Wii bit of hope for everyone.
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