“Many uses for the Wii Remote” – Wii Play

The current UK #1 game is Horizon Forbidden West. It has now returned to the top of the chart in May and June 2022 three times. This is little doubt that this is not because of significant movements in demand for the game, but rather because of increases in availability of the still rare PlayStation 5, coupled with bundles of the console with the game. Plus, of course, slow weeks elsewhere. The chart tracks which games people are buying, but not why, so it often reflects such forces.

In late 2007, and in 2008, and 2009, Wii Play’s trips to the top of the new individual formats chart also reflected the power of a sales bundle and a console in high demand. Wii Play came packaged with a Wii Remote, and cost only £10 more than buying one on its own. Large numbers of new Wii players (and there would be lots of them for a while yet) wanted to be able to play with someone else, and if they already wanted a second Wiimote then that deal was an attractive proposition. With Wii Play’s nine different mini-games, its effective price worked out at barely more than a quid a game, after all.

This was part of a wider move. Nintendo opting out of a graphics technological arms race and providing an alternative with low price as a central feature was not so different from what budget home computer publishers like Mastertronic did here in the ‘80s, and it worked for them too. There were plenty of ways in which Wii Sports and Wii Play reached for a new audience, adopting a radically different approach and presentation, but the Wii costing less than half the launch price of the PS3 (£180 versus £425) was a big one too. Offering another cheap game gave it another chance to show people what its new console could do.

Developed alongside Wii Sports before being moved to the lower priority of the two, Wii Play is even more explicitly a technical demonstration of the capabilities of the Wii and its controller. It forces you to play its nine games in order, and each comes with intro text covering the techniques it is about to introduce. Twisting, turning, and above all pointing are explained and expanded on. Several of these are again done through sports, or at least activities that exist at the periphery of sports: hockey relabelled as laser hockey, fishing, table tennis, billiards. Billiards is one of the most reliant on pressing buttons and ideas established by the time of Steve Davis and Jimmy White, but the power of the shot being determined by using the Wii remote to mime the movement of a pool cue is a satisfying addition.

Using such familiar topics made sense and had a lot of precedent. Go back and look at Pong, a breakthrough for games in a form easily parsable as an existing sport, or indeed at Tennis for Two a decade or so earlier still. Wii Play’s Table Tennis, focused on keeping the ball going backward and forward, couldn’t even take a point off Wii Sports’s tennis, but it looks a lot like that very old basic unit of video game. Except that instead of using the familiar to make electronic interaction approachable, it uses it to make motion controls approachable.

It’s not games of the ‘50s and ‘70s that Wii Play is most reminiscent of, though, but the multi-event sports games of the ‘80s when home computers were becoming a big cultural force. There is a similar level of throwing things at the wall to see if they stick and selling the volume and novelty of everything thrown, regardless of the state of it. Specifically, if Wii Sports was the ultimate version of a Daley Thompson’s Decathlon type sporting package, Wii Play is Daley Thompson’s Super Test – what to move onto next, with no such organising framework and focus. That makes it the more fascinating and revealing of the two games, if not the more enjoyable.

Outside of the mini-games based on sports, where you generally interact with the action via invisible hand, the closest thing to an organising theme is the use of the Wii’s Mii avatars. These charming and flexible figures are present throughout Wii Sports too, letting players put themselves and others into the action, but Wii Play does more with its Miis, and not just in the sense of having a mini-game where they ride cows. In the opening lightgun-like ‘Shooting Range’, you save versions of yourself from alien abduction. In ‘Pose Mii’, you move your avatar around the screen and rotate and flex it to fit into Mii-shaped bubbles, like that Junji Ito meme except that you find your hole fifty times a minute. It leans completely on the intersection of the appeal of Miis with wonder at being able to rotate things on screen with a simple hand movement, and that takes it a surprisingly long way.

Then there’s ‘Find Mii’, the best thing in the collection. It starts off with simply looking for two matching Miis among a lined-up group of them, racing to click on them. The success of Miis (and the reason Microsoft would rip them off completely) is already clear from scanning the gallery of cheerfully familiar and unfamiliar faces. From there, things get more inventive, with darkness, swimming, trips into space, and challenges like picking up on the odd ones out looking the wrong way in a Wii Sports tennis audience. With its density of new ideas explored to exactly their logical limit, ‘Find Mii’ is like the Super Mario Bros. 3 of Where’s Wally?. Its use of other bits of the Wii’s fledgling infrastructure also presents the beginnings of a common world.

It’s one that Wii Play does not follow through on in total. The intro text for each mini-game, played in enforced order, doesn’t just provide an introduction, but an overall narrative of sorts. New control approaches are introduced as new challenges and lessons to be learned on the way to a full mastery of the Wii Remote, a crash course in gaming. Nintendo were making much of starting afresh with new audiences, but they were still the same company that had been a hegemonic force in the industry in previous times, and were not completely escaping decades of historical gravity. The final game on the collection is top-down combat simulation ‘Tanks!’. Wii Play, Nintendo’s year zero blank slate, starts with a game in which you shoot things, and takes you through nine games’ worth of development to one in which you move and shoot things.