My earliest memories of computer games are of Rockman. Not the game known over here as Mega Man, but a clone of Boulder Dash. I would come home from school and immediately ask to play it, digging and diamond-collecting my way through the first level over and over. At one level the memorable excitement wasn’t even the challenge or the sense of place, but the sheer wonder of moving a joystick and seeing the little person on the screen move accordingly, the magic of interactivity.
The next time a game would feel like unlocking something completely new in the same way it was as a guest playing Lemmings on a family friend’s Amiga. The quick movement of the mouse and the ability to strategise and react with 100 walkers at once got back to at least some of that feeling of pleasure right in the first principles of the thing. I was not alone. Lemmings was a huge hit with an even bigger (indirect) impact on the future of games.
After that, though, the games which provided my personal big moments didn’t really line up with games which had a bigger effect at large. The closest I got was falling in love with Final Fantasy VIII and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, but they were both follow-ups rather than the real big event themselves. I fell further out from games and by 2006 I had pretty much moved away altogether, the better to immerse myself more fully in pop music and writing about it. Then something big happened.
I pretty much didn’t have anything other than adverts and reviews to go on in my decision to buy a Wii soon after its release in December 2006 (if it hadn’t been for knowing I could play the sequel to Wind Waker on it, I might not have been so fast). It didn’t even take as long as playing a game to feel some of the same old magic of technological interactivity, just pointing the controller at the screen and the hand cursor on the screen moving and turning with mine. And Wii Sports went much further.
Wii Sports is a blend of glorious surface simplicity and a fair bit of complexity. The basic proposition is that you swing the controller like you’re playing the sport and your little person on screen moves with you, and it follows through on this with smooth ease. Well, the smoothness requires a certain level of correct engagement from players, but in practice having things like doing the swing movement wrong in bowling and glitching through to the hardest possible throw every time actually worked as a nice way of evening things up for players who were particularly new to this whole thing.
Tennis, the best of all of its five sports, works on an inverse approach to Virtua Tennis. That simplified things by removing timing from the equation. Wii Sports tennis instead removes movement, using doubles to better be able to cover the ground. Timing becomes the way of directing the ball, together with movements for force and spin. It felt instantly graspable but took a whole lot of practice to really get better at, with some more traditional video game touches like the super-speed serve if you time things just right. Coming back 15 years later, there were more details I had forgotten, like just how much the thwack sounds from the controller’s own speaker add to the experience. It turns out, too, that a surprising amount of the basic feeling of wonder came back to me right away. Perhaps Nintendo Switch Sports will bring more still.
Each of the other four sports has their high points as well, even the exhausting rush of boxing. Bowling achieves even more of a feel of doing the real thing than tennis; golf builds smartly on an established video game language while making previous complex swing mechanisms look irrelevant. Baseball gets the best sense of swooping spectacle, and just getting to watch all of the miniature versions of your friends line up on your team feels like quite the reward for the process of everyone creating their Miis. It also fits completely with the friendly nature of everything. The console and controllers in their slick white and their blue LEDs gave an iPod’s sense of smart new technology, but the sense of enveloping warm welcome that everything about its menu and Wii Sports provided was smart and new in a different sense.
Wii Sports is one of the most successful games ever and appealed to lots of people who had never played games, or in my parents’ case hadn’t since roughly the time of Lemmings. One of my fondest memories of Wii Sports is from an anniversary family gathering where a relative had brought a Wii and projector. My teenage cousin challenged me to a game of tennis. I set up my Mii with a pink shirt since I was wearing one that day (something I replicated in every Mii from then on) and we got going, me starting with the confidence of my mastery of the game. We had an audience of family members of many ages who all understood what they were watching and had mostly played it themselves.
I promptly started losing every point going, utterly failing to get into any kind of rhythm and entering a confidence spiral. It took until match point down to finally win a point, begin to turn things around and switch the pressure. Sweating, hurriedly throwing my tie aside and feeling all eyes on me, it felt for a few minutes like I was part of a big sporting event. And all that from an impromptu setup in a side room. The universality was almost as central to the magic as the interactivity.
Coming back to Wii Sports after playing through the #1 games of the preceding couple of years gives illuminating context for its impact. Some of those games were fantastic, some expanded what games could do, some both, but it has still been hard to avoid the sense of an industry doubling down on what were felt to be settled questions of audience and purpose. Games companies catered again again to a specific presumed audience of young male established gamers. They produced a world in which an advert saying “your girlfriend’s white bits here” stood out in how far it went, but not in any way in its guiding principles.
Nintendo, meanwhile, were and are a conservative and profit-driven company who had mercilessly leveraged their dominant position in earlier console generations elsewhere in the world, who greedily used nostalgia and restrictions to sell the same games to fans again and again, accompanied by acting as harsh copyright police. They hadn’t been immune to some sexist adverts of their own when it suited them. The cuddly, welcoming approach they brought in with the Wii should not have been that straightforward to pull off, and it took some imagination and confidence to try and to succeed. I don’t think it’s just hindsight, though, to say that the tunnel vision of the rest of the industry had left them a fucking enormous open goal.
[Uncharted is an occasional feature where I look at games which were massively successful but, for whatever reason, were not eligible for the charts so could not possibly have made my list of #1 games. In this case it is because Wii Sports was included with the Wii console rather than sold separately.]
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