Wii Sports (Wii, 2006)
With over 80 million copies sold, making it one of the top selling games of all time, there’s no doubt of Wii Sports’ success. Granted, it did come bundled with most consoles, but it’s still the game that attracted a wider audience than any other: children, teens, adults and elderlies. Anyone who owned a Wii would have at some point plugged it in played a casual round of golf with a friend, a match of tennis with a group of visitors, or bowled against their family. It was a game that made such clever use of the groundbreaking motion controls that it made you feel as though you were actually taking part in the sports.
In that sense it didn’t feel like a video game, which was why Wii Sports and the console itself were so successful. It may not hold any of the ‘greatest game’ accolades, but that’s irrelevant. It brought gaming even more into the mainstream, and in that respect alone it was a genius launch title by Nintendo.
