subject: The Unknown History Of The Nintendo Wii [print this page] The Wii may seem like a revolutionary device but it actually has it's origins 20 years ago with the Nintendo Power Glove. The ability to control on screen characters with your body actions has been around since 1989 even though it was a rudimentary attempt, it was still released and available back then. Even though the Power Glove itself and the games that were designed for it were giant flops, they cleared the way for the Nintendo Wii to make its debut.
Not much has changed as far as the physical structure of the system. The Power glove featured PVC plastic pipes that were meant to be Velcro taped to your television set. The Wii requires a sensor strip to be placed near the television as well. When you would move the Power Glove around, the character or car would turn as directed. The glove didn't have very good accuracy, but the Wii's accuracy is not 100% by any means.
The Wii system itself was first thought of in 2001 when Nintendo realized that there would be too much competition if all of the video game developers just focused on sheer computing power. They decided to take their console in a different direction in an attempt to grab more of the market. By reaching a broader demographic of players, they thought that they would be able to get more people to play, and therefore buy, their system.
The launch of the Nintendo DS also factored into the development of the Wii. The designers kept the DS in mind as they designed and developed the Wii remote. They felt that if the the DS was not received well by gamers that the Wii would not be as well. If the DS would have bombed, they were ready to start from scratch on the Wii system.
When the Wii first launched it was hard to get yourself one. In true Nintendo fashion they sent deliberately small first shipments to create a raging demand for their new product. They sold 600,000 units in its first eight days of being released in the Americas. Since that time it's earned Nintendo hundreds of millions of dollars.
So many people wondered what the Wii would be like. It spent much of its development phase code named as Revolution. They named it Wii and left out Nintendo. When asked why they chose Wii they gave many reasons such as it sounds like "we" and the two i's make it look like two people standing next to each other. At the time of this writing the Wii is the number one selling console of the seventh generation video game systems, outselling both of its main competitors the X-Box 360 and the PlayStation 3.
