Wii Sports

Wii Sports is the game that sold the console. In Europe and America it was bundled directly in the Wii box, and for a huge number of people it was the very first video game they ever held in their hands. It offers five disciplines: tennis, bowling, golf, baseball, and boxing. None of them has complicated rules or sprawling menus. You pick up the Wii Remote, swing it like a racket or fling it like a bowling ball, and the game handles the rest. That immediacy was the key ingredient, because it demonstrated the point of the new controller more clearly than any marketing ever could.

The presentation is deliberately minimalist. Players appear as Mii, simple avatars that everyone creates in the console's system editor, and the venues are clean white surfaces without unnecessary detail. That kept the game running smoothly and, above all, kept it from intimidating anyone. But there's more hiding beneath the surface than you'd expect: in tennis, the timing of your swing matters, and the game distinguishes a flat shot from a drop shot; bowling responds to the rotation of your wrist; and golf requires judging the strength of your backswing. Boxing also uses the Nunchuk, so for the first time you box with both hands at once. A training mode and a fitness test featuring your so-called sports age gave players a reason to come back and track their progress.

Its impact at the time was enormous. Wii Sports showed up in TV news segments, in retirement homes and hospitals as a form of rehabilitation, and became the symbol of what people started calling games for everyone. It also kicked off a wave of imitators, most of which only copied the surface without the carefully tuned motion detection underneath. Today it's clear that it was a technical compromise, since the original Wii Remote, without the later add-on, only tracked motion approximately, and the game often had to guess what you meant to do. Even so, it remains a fantastic party game that works almost instantly in a room full of people without any need to explain the rules. The influence of Wii Sports is still visible today in how naturally we now take motion controls for granted in virtual reality and on mobile devices.