Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [94]
Miyamoto had a guiding principle when designing the console: make moms happy. Moms had an uneasy relationship with the game machines that sucked the sand out of their kids’ hourglasses—and lured away the dads as well. Mom was the person who had to buy this stupid expensive time waster, and purchase new games every Christmas and birthday, writing down these ridiculously precise titles—not just Star Wars but Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast for Xbox—for fear of buying the wrong one.
One way to make moms happy was to give their console a simple, happy name: Wii. Another was a low(er) price. And there were the games: family friendly stuff younger brothers could stay in the room to watch. To further prep moms for this shift, McDonalds and Nintendo put out Mario Happy Meal toys aimed at encouraging healthy, active lifestyles. (Make your own jokes about that.) One huge mom advantage? Every Wii would have a pack-in game.
Wii Sports would contain five different games—tennis, bowling, boxing, golf, and baseball. Combined, they were a steal. Another game, Wii Play, took a similar format to activities like skeet shooting, air hockey, pool, and fishing. When it was bundled for no extra cost with a second controller, which alone retailed for forty dollars, Wii Play sold itself.
And that Wii controller . . . It may have started with the desire to not have long wires uglying up the living room. Nintendo had had success with the wireless Wavebird controller for the Gamecube. All of the Xbox 360 and PS3’s controllers, remarkably, were wireless. Their controllers had traditional setups: control stick on the left, lots of buttons on the right, index-finger triggers, plus more buttons and more control sticks. Mom was scared she would shoot off a nuke if she handled it the wrong way.
Finding a way to friendly it up challenged many of the long-held assumptions about gaming. Players moved with their left hand, and performed actions with their right hand. It synced up with clumsy pop neurology: the left brain was great with logic and spatial relations (such as where to move) and the right brain was for art (which creative method to dispatch the guard?). This basis more or less defined games as being Mario-ish third-person adventures, since that’s what it was designed to do. The games that tried to mix up controls were rare, and often counterintuitive to play at first.
Miyamoto went back to the drawing board, back to the beginning of games themselves. They were ways to pass the time, to have fun, to duplicate tasks your body would normally do. They were tools: tools for fun. Fun was much broader than controlling a character.
Years before Donkey Kong, Nintendo had marketed a light-gun game. Players held a toy gun and shot imaginary bullets. Games since then had lost that generality of play. Play was something everyone did. What had happened to the industry so a typical mom would say she wasn’t a “gamer”? This is someone who deals herself rounds of Freecell, actually enjoys Sorry and Chutes and Ladders, pretends to be a princess for a tea party, and helps her kids with batting practice. The same woman might tear through a Nora Roberts book, yet claim to not “read” because Nora isn’t Virginia Woolf. Well, she does read, and she does plays games. Nintendo just had to let her feel good about that.
Miyamoto and company looked at lots of different devices with buttons—not just game controllers but cell phones and channel changers. They wanted to see what felt right. After trying a cell phone – derived controller, they went with a remote-control shape. Unlike most remotes, this one would have only a few white-on-white buttons: their size and location denoted their relative importance. One-handed, no control stick, simple as a garage door opener. When the Wii’s name was released, the device—officially the Wii remote—got the inevitable nickname of Wiimote.
Building on the accelerometer research HAL did a few years previous, the Wiimote could sense movement. Three accelerometers controlled