With its unique controller, emphasis on entertainment over technological power, and one of the most expansive libraries of serious classics and absolute shovelware a console has ever seen, the Nintendo Wii made a profound mark on history. But which parts of its history are less known? Let’s look at some surprising and downright weird facts about one of Nintendo’s most iconic and successful systems.
1. Wii Training for Surgeons
While not necessarily a substitute for actual training, as I might panic if I saw a surgeon approaching me with a Wiimote and a copy of Boom Blox, a US study discovered that the Wii remote’s ability to demand delicate, finely-tuned movements could be a practical way to increase a surgeon’s preparation for the operating theater.
In particular, the game Marble Madness, and its objective of guiding a ball through a 3D maze, was found to be a good way to brush up on the fundamentals of precision and steadiness in surgery. The game offered physical challenges related to keyhole surgery in particular, which involves utilizing small cuts and sometimes even a camera to diagnose and treat patients.
But that’s not the only time a scientific study suggested the Wii had potential in this arena. A 2013 study concluded its findings by stating “The Nintendo® Wii might be helpful, inexpensive and entertaining part of the training of young laparoscopists, in addition to a standard surgical education based on simulators and the operating room.”
Neat!
2. Two Lit Candles Can Replace the Wii Sensor
You might look at that little bar that helped you sail through the stars in Super Mario Galaxy or send you to sleep in Link’s Crossbow Training and think that it’s a thing of magic. The truth is, anything that gives off the infrared light your Wii remote needs to communicate will do the trick, but two tea lights placed evenly apart seems to do the trick best.
While it’s true that you can use two candles to simulate the sensor that allows your Nintendo Wii remote to function, it’s also true that this can potentially be very easy to treat yourself to some nasty burns, especially if your brain hasn’t fully formed yet.
This was the case for at least one child in 2012, and while people are still discovering the magic of infrared light bulbs and electronics, it’s hard to imagine that only one person has ever experienced an accident while playing Wii Sports or Red Steel 2 in this style. The Ammanford, Carmarthenshire child from Wales would need skin grafts for the 8% burns sustained to his chest. Not great.
It’s a neat party trick, just, again, try not to burn the damn house down.
3. Shigeru Miyamoto Tried to Make Miis a Thing for Years
One of the ways in which the Wii defined itself as a console to be shared with friends and family, your Mii could do all sorts of things, including participate in numerous games. We all remember trying to take on Matt, who himself was probably modeled on Terry Crews based on the ass whoopings he’d hand out.
A lot of people know that the Mii was the brainchild of Shigeru Miyamoto, with the actual Mii creation process being spearheaded by designers like Yamashita Takayuki. But what people may not know is that Miyamoto had this concept in his back pocket for two full decades.
In a 2007 GDC keynote speech, Miyamoto revealed a Famicom demo he had come up with in which players could draw faces onto avatars. While not the fully realized Mii concept that would become part of the Wii years later, the concept intrigued Miyamoto despite not having an actual game to put the idea in.
Avatar creation would resurface in other consoles, including the Nintendo 64 and the Nintendo GameCube, but it would take the development of the Wii to finally bring the idea to the mainstream. Miis are still a feature of the Switch, but Nintendo really hasn’t made half as big a deal of them, and that’s a shame.
4. Microsoft and Sony Rejected the Wii’s Motion Control Tech
There’s a lot of “benefit of hindsight” stories in video games, such as Sega rejecting a collaboration proposal with Sony that certainly didn’t come back to haunt them. Sony themselves, along with Microsoft, had a similar experience when both companies rejected the motion control tech that would eventually power the Wii’s meteoric rise to success.
In fact, according to inventor Tom Quinn, the meeting with Microsoft went so badly, an executive apologized to him afterwards for the apparent rudeness of his colleagues. It didn’t go much better at Sony, where PlayStation 1 creator Ken Kutaragi apparently closed his eyes at the beginning of Quinn’s presentation and didn’t open them again until the presentation finished. That’s a bit much, but I am suddenly picturing him being completely enraptured by C-12: The Final Resistance, of all things.
Nintendo, on the other hand, was far more receptive. Purchasing a small stake in Quinn’s company granted them a license, which Nintendo then utilized in the creation of the Wii, and the rest is wristory. Sorry.
5. The Wii Remote Dealt With So Many Lawsuits
While Nintendo is no stranger to suing people or being sued themselves, the revolutionary Wii Remote came under a particularly harsh level of scrutiny from a slew of companies. All of which believed they were the true inventors or copyright holders of the technology used in the remotes.
By our count, no less than four major companies have brought lawsuits against Nintendo for the Wii remote. Interlink Electronics kicked off the first one in December 2006, only to have the suit tossed out in March of the following year. Hillcrest Laboratories would fare a bit better in 2008 with a suit that was eventually settled out of court, the terms of which have never been made public.
ThinkOptics sued in 2011 for violating its patents, extending the suit to the Wii U as well, before being dismissed in 2014. Finally, in 2012, iLife Technologies sued a number of companies for alleged patent infringements, including Nintendo, winning a jury ruling in 2017 that would be upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals in December of that year. The original judgment was then overturned quite recently, in 2020, claiming their patent was too broad.
6. The Wii Could Help You Out Financially
It’s easy to make a lot of bad financial decisions once you buy a Wii, especially if you fall into the Just Dance extended universe. But the Wii could also help you with your budget, too.
In the UK in 2014 the Conservative government tried to use the Nintendo Wii to help citizens get the information and assistance they needed regarding their Universal Credit benefits.
Despite a rollout program that didn’t seem to go especially great, the Department for Work and Pensions tried to get the word out in as many ways as possible. Information on an individual’s benefits could be accessed on select digital TVs, with the Wii becoming part of that in 2014, even though the Wii U was already out. It was the hope of the government that the Wii could help bridge the considerable gap between program benefit information and the fact that more than seven million people in the UK didn’t have easy access to the internet
Was the measure successful? We honestly couldn’t say, as you don’t tend to get reviews for government programs online, but as the TV information channels received some 30,000 hits by the time the Wii was added, it’s likely that the Wii really did help some people out financially.
7. Wii Caught a Criminal! In Japan!
When it comes to the Mii, we’re talking about an element of the Wii that arguably gave it a lot of its personality. Where would the console be without all of its many freaky little dudes? Tens of millions of personalized avatars were created by Wii owners and players, and one Mii in particular was created for completely different reasons.
In 2009, it was reported that Japanese police used the Mii creation feature to design a visual impression of a young man being sought in connection with a hit and run. Police decided to forgo the usual tactics of police artists or using Photoshop software, instead creating a Mii based on the description they had and combining that with a real photograph of the car involved in the hit and run.
Spearheaded by officers in the Kanagawa Prefecture, it’s unknown if the measure actually worked. We’re inclined to guess that it didn’t, since seemingly no one else tried this, but it did get Nintendo another Guiness World Record, so that’s exciting. Wait, first use of Nintendo for a criminal investigation? What was Mario Is Missing! all about then?
8. Wii Sports Almost Wasn’t Bundled with the Wii
Wii Sports made fantastic use of the Wii remote through its athletic-themed minigames, and the simplicity and ease-of-use inherent in these games no doubt went a long way towards making the system a hit.
However, the decision to bundle Wii Sports with the Wii itself wasn’t something Nintendo knew they were going to do from the beginning.
In his 2022 book Disrupting the Game: From The Bronx To The Top Of Nintendo former Nintendo President and CEO Reggie Fils-Aimé detailed that the decision to bundle Wii Sports in every region except Japan was the result of several “challenging” meetings with management, with Shigeru Miyamoto in particular being dead set against releasing the game, offering an early version of Wii Play as the pack-in game, and telling both Reggie and Mike Fukada “”Neither of you understands the challenges of creating software that people love to play. This is something we constantly push ourselves to do. We do not give away our software,”
Thankfully, as Fils-Aimé’s book emphasizes, such disagreements were infrequent and always respectful.
9. The Inspiration Behind Wii Telling You to Take a Break
Nintendo has a history of putting little nods back to their history into the menus of their consoles. So, it’s fascinating to discover the origins behind the Wii’s quirky “Why not take a break?” screen was inspired by the 1995 SNES RPG Earthbound.
While all of us remember the screen with varying levels of fondness or irritation when you’re balls deep in Phase 4 of the Just Dance extended universe, you may not know that the origins behind the screen were revealed in the touching 2021 book Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s Legendary CEO. In a discussion between Iwata, Earthbound creator Shigesato Itoi, and Yasuhiro Nagata, Itoi mentioned Iwata being flummoxed by his decision to include a feature in which the father of Earthbound’s protagonist Ness ask the player if they wanted to take a break at the two-hour mark.
In the same conversation, Nagata teasingly mentioned that Iwata himself reused the idea for the Nintendo Wii years later. “That’s right,” Itawa said laughingly in the interview. “Mr. Itoi’s idea of adding a ‘Two-hour Dad’ had at some point taken hold of me, and I wound up adding something similar to the Wii.”
10. The Wii Remote Was Originally Made for the GameCube
Selling for approximately $663 USD on a Japanese auction site through Yahoo Auctions, the 2018 emergence of what was essentially a Wii remote built for the GameCube came as a great shock to many. Even those who understood the evolution of the controller were surprised by just how closely this GameCube remote resembles the final product.
However, it’s not that the Wii remote was originally made specifically for the GameCube, but rather it was a prototype for Nintendo’s next-gen console that was made to be tested on what was then Nintendo’s current console. This is why the controller, bundled with a sensor bar and an early version of what eventually became the nunchuck, was made to be used with a GameCube developer kit.
While Nintendo would go through a few different design concepts for the Wii remote, it’s cool to see that even from the beginning, the Wii was taking Nintendo in a new direction.
Could you imagine how much that remote would sell for now in a post-lockdown retro market? We could probably finance the Mad World remaster the world needs by ourselves.
11. Wii Never Got These Games
The Wii in particular saw numerous announced titles that either later came out for a different system or were completely abandoned. Some of these games, including Metroid Tactics, Star Fox Zero, and the first Kid Icarus game in two decades, could have further defined the system as one of the greatest of all time before later winding up on the 3DS. A Wii-exclusive sequel to Wave Race: Blue Storm would have been pretty sweet, too. It’s been way too long since we saw that series.
With some of these unreleased games, things never got past the experimentation stage. This was true of Star Fox Zero, which wasn’t specifically developed for the Wii, but rather the Wii U with material from a Wii Star Fox game that never happened. Metroid Tactics was pitched as a turned-based tactical series in the vein of XCOM, and it’s a damn shame that never came to fruition either.
The most unfortunate cancelled Wii game, arguably, was Dragon’s Crown. Amazingly, Dragon’s Crown originally began as a Dreamcast game, but for a variety of reasons, struggled through a hellishly long production period before finally getting released for the PS3 and Vita in 2013.
We were also supposed to get a Wii version of Garfield Gets Real.
12. The Most Wasteful Disc Ever
In terms of gigabytes, the three largest Nintendo Wii games on record are Metroid Prime Trilogy (7.45GB), Metroid: Other M (7.28GB), and Super Smash Bros. Brawl (6.77GB). We mention this because it’s important to have something to compare when we tell you the smallest Nintendo Wii game ever released, that being a completely straight port of the 1993 SNES release Super Mario All-Stars, coming in at a staggering 0.03GB. That leaves 99.7% of the disc used to store the game completely unused.
Worse yet, this isn’t a port of the version of Super Mario All-Stars that included Super Mario World. We’ve got the three mainline NES games, the Japan-exclusive sequel that was eventually released worldwide as The Lost Levels, and that’s it. No in-game special features or improvements of any kind.
The original release of the game included a soundtrack and booklet to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Mario, and that was enough to justify charging full price for a game that also has the distinction of being the only Wii game that doesn’t require the disc to remain in the console in order to work.
13. Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road Location In The Real World
Certain questions can’t help but haunt humanity, like chicken or the egg? Ketchup or catsup? No quandary better fits this fact than where Mario Kart’s iconic Rainbow Road can be found in the real world. Someone really did go out and come up with a canonical answer, and that answer varies from one version of Mario Kart to the next. For example, Rainbow Road’s location in Mario Kart Wii is different from the location of Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 8 on Wii U.
So, where do you have to go for Mario Kart Wii? By examining the skyboxes, you’ll see that it matches up with a decent chunk of Canada. The track is quite large in comparison to Earth, with much of the track covering northeastern Canada, particularly Quebec. There’s a small portion of the track that overlaps Greenland, which is where we’re assuming they’re keeping that Mad World remaster.
By comparison, Mario Kart 8’s Rainbow Road is much smaller than the earth and can be found along part of the Mediterranean Sea. That’ll be a little harder to walk, though.
14. Official Wii Releases Continued Into 2020
The Wii was officially discontinued in 2013, but the Wii Shop continued to run until 2019, and Nintendo themselves continued to offer repair support for the system until early 2020, citing a scarcity in the necessary spare parts. It might sound like they went above and beyond, but this is nothing new from a company whose support for its original Famicom in Japan didn’t end until 2007.
Despite the Wii ceasing production in 2013, several companies simply continued to release games. Given the massive number of consoles that were sold, and the system’s value for exercise and fitness, it just made sense to Ubisoft for them to keep giving the system new Just Dance installments until, you’re about to hear us correctly, the year 2019 with Just Dance 2020.
Let’s Sing from Voxler also came out on the Wii that year, with the last game coming to the Wii in 2019. That’s kind of wild, but not the wildest examples, as both Retro City Rampage DX and Shakedown Hawaii got physical releases in 2020 too.
15. Operation Rainfall: Sometimes Shouting Loudly Helps
Any fandom can be a mixed bag, especially if the person they idolise happens to occasionally play a guitar and sing about their 15 evil exes, but you can’t deny that when fans of anything combine their resources for something positive, it can be a force for good.
Such is the story of Operation Rainfall, also known as Oprainfall, which would become such a massive campaign to bring select Japanese Wii releases to the U.S., Europe, and beyond, Nintendo President Reggie Fils-Aimé would reference the fan effort in an interview.
Operation Rainfall started in 2011 by making a push to get localizations and releases for Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, and Pandora’s Tower. Nintendo will never say how much of an influence they actually were, but we would imagine it was substantial, since you had the President of the company mentioning the campaign by name. All three games would perform admirably with critics and sales on the console, with Xenoblade in particular going on to become a core pillar for Nintendo, and Nintendo Wii fans outside of Japan had three more excellent reasons to support the system.
What people may not know, though, is that Operation Rainfall is kinda still going on now, with it being a news blog since 2015. Neat!
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