So, yes, I agree with you and I frequently make this point about music, that everyone thinks music peaked when they were in high school.
reply(And if I were to make an argument about a childhood console being peak, for me it'd be the 64 or GameCube!)
But I think the Wii was a singularly unique console because it brought a particular kind of casual gaming to the masses that no console before or after has been able to do. Looking back, it's wild that people wanted to buy a bunch of custom hardware to play Rock Band! And the Wiimotes are probably the best TV controllers ever made.
There's an objective argument behind this statement that could be made though - everyone, and I mean _almost literally everyone_ tried a Wii at some point during its regular lifespan. Even if it was just Wii Sports, it brought millions of people into video games who only considered them another toy. Parents, grandparents, a lot of the people who chastised video games for years were suddenly enamoured with virtual bowling and sword fights, while the rest of us still got our fill of Mario et. al.
replyI don't know a single person in my country except for me who ever played Wii, and only a handful of people who even heard about it.
replySo, a ridiculous statement. :)
As much as it pains me to say that, the same could be said about mobile gaming. In fact, I am pretty sure a lot of countries did not have access to Nintendo hardware but they can now enjoy gaming thanks to their phone.
replyI suppose. 95%+ of the games I've played on my phone are one euchre implementation. I tried a couple of early space-shooting games (Motorola Photon Q era and earlier) and basically gave up on the idea. No joystick, trying to hit the right spot on a phone to actually do anything is hard (I type with one finger on a phone vs. 140+ wpm on a keyboard), etc. Plus, I rarely have sound on, so that part is also missing.
replyGames I currently play: SupermegaBaseball, Assetto Corsa (with wheel), Dirt series on gaming PC. Also various Mario etc games on Wii U.
I did grow up with a number of mobile games from my childhood, but it seems like the ones people earnestly enjoy are maybe Pokemon Go and then a number of centuries old card games.
replyProbably, but the Wii games are actually good, as well, not microtransaction slop factories.
replyWhile the Wii didn't have modern microtransactions, its surprise popularity led to a lot of poorly produced cash grab games. I'd count those as slop, even if they aren't AI-produced slop.
replyThe term for those is "shovelware", and the Wii really did have a lot of it.
reply>There's an objective argument behind this statement that could be made though
replyEveryone says that about their childhood too :)
> _almost literally everyone_
replySorry to disappoint, but I don't even know what a Wii looks like. I've always been using my computer to play games on.
I grew up playing NES and SNES games and DOS games like Doom and Quake, and while I have a lot of fond memories and still think very highly of many of the games of that era, there’s no way I’d call it peak gaming. I’ve revisited them a lot over the years and game development as an art has certainly come a long way since then IMO.
replyWii U is even better since it can play all the Wii games. And that's NOT my childhood - my childhood was audio cassette drives for storage.
replyI was 26 when I bought one, and agree. I long for a modern STB with the Wii interface and lots of OSS to tinker with. The sounds, the music, the tactile feel of using the WiiMode to navigate was sublime.
replyThe games were cool too.
The Wii had possibly the best big screen UI I’ve ever used. I always thought having the live icon tiles on a regular TV with station previews would be incredible. The WiiMotes worked so much better than the Samsung and LG remote pointers do now.
replyThere's been HTPC frontends that emulated that UI. I think no longer maintained.
replyThese days, probably you could feed a video into Claude Code and have it spit out one which is pretty decent.
We bought the first Wii at 35. We still have a Wii U for the family and still play 4-player games, and have 8 WiiMotes for Smash Brothers.
replyBought my first one 3 years ago. It's used occasionally -- I'm not a gamer at all but I have a little kid and she likes it.
replyguilty as charged here. I will say my parents are quite fond of the Wii too though. (they’re not really gamers though)
replyYeah part of the magic of the Wii was that everyone seemed to have one. Even grandparents and other folks that wouldn't usually have a game console seemed to have them and be able to figure it out.
replyIn defense the Wii was popular with people that very likely died of natural causes years ago.
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