This Small, 17 Year Old Console Will Free You From Adulthood’s Shackles

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Max Phillips

Mind Cafe

It’s Christmas 2008. A roar erupts from the living room. Nan shrugs off her second helping of fruit cake, steps up to bowl, flicks her wrist and bags herself a strike. Boom. “Who taught Nan how to game?” the 10-year-old clutching his brand-new PSP (Playstation Portable — the genesis of the Nintendo Switch) thinks to himself. Not one to be outdone, he sets his sights on the virtual ski slope. He climbs onto the board and rockets downhill, picking up speeds Nan can only dream of achieving. With near-perfect form, he sores into high-score territory and, for a brief moment, asserts his dominance at the top of the family food chain. Nan is shell-shocked. Dad looks on proudly. All is well with the world.

Yes, that 10-year-old was me. I may not have known it back then, but there’s only one console capable of fairly pitting people of all ages and gaming experiences together. It’s not the Switch or the PS5. It’s the Nintendo Wii.

Every adult longs for their inner child (even if they don’t realise it).

I’ll be honest. I thought the Wii was dead. That all changed when I left my family home and moved to London last year. I re-introduced it into my universe and came to a high-definition realisation: Nintendo created far more than Christmas Day family filler.

They created a feeling.

The Nintendo Wii was born out of survival. Creator and Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto — the man behind iconic properties such as Mario and The Legend of Zelda — acknowledged the growing complexity of modern gaming and the industry’s need for diversification. A console for all was required.

Designing the Wii for a wider audience put Miyamoto on the front foot from day one. Sure, people gamed before the Wii’s release but never had a console brought together people of such vastly different ages. Why? Co-authors of Codename Revolution, Steven Jones and George Thiruvathukal, discuss one possibility:

The ‘coffee table mentality.’