The Wii sells motion control to people who don't call themselves gamers
Pointing and swinging a remote replaces button-mashing as Nintendo's pitch
Quick facts
- Manufacturer
- Nintendo
- North America launch
- 19 November 2006
- Key feature
- Motion-sensing Wii Remote
- Lifetime sales
- Over 100 million units
What happened
After the GameCube struggled against Sony and Microsoft's consoles, Nintendo revealed a successor codenamed 'Revolution' built around an entirely different premise: instead of more buttons or better graphics, the Wii Remote used accelerometers and an infrared sensor so players could swing, point, and gesture in physical space to control on-screen action, in games such as Wii Sports bowling and tennis. Nintendo launched the console, renamed simply Wii, in North America on 19 November 2006, and it sold out almost immediately worldwide, with shortages persisting well into 2007. Rather than compete on raw processing power, Nintendo aimed the console at people who had never considered themselves gamers, including older adults and young children.
Why it matters
The Wii went on to sell more than 100 million units by appealing to an audience console makers had largely ignored, proving that accessible, novel controls could outsell raw technical horsepower and reshaping how the whole industry thought about who a game console was for.
How we know
The Computer History Museum's own timeline entry documents the Wii Remote's sensor technology and Nintendo's sales figures; Nintendo Life's six-years-later retrospective, drawing on its own contemporaneous games coverage, corroborates the console's reception and its shift away from the traditional 'hardcore' gaming audience.
Sources
- Computer History Museum. 2006: Timeline of Computer History · Reputable sourcecomputerhistory.org · The domain "computerhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Nintendo Life. Looking Back at Six Years of Wii · Reputable sourcenintendolife.com · The domain "nintendolife.com" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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