The Year Nintendo Won

E3 2006 was the one that actually mattered. Los Angeles, May, and the whole industry holding its breath for Sony to show what a $599 console looked like—which turned out to be a fairly ugly black slab and a price point that became an instant meme. Sony came in arrogant and left bruised. Meanwhile Nintendo was doing something nobody in the press had quite figured out how to take seriously: a white controller you swung through the air.

I was following every liveblog I could find, completely losing my mind over the Wii. Not the PS3, not whatever Microsoft was showing—the Wii, the little white box with the motion controls that the gaming press had spent six months calling a gimmick. On the show floor it apparently did not feel like a gimmick at all. People queued for hours to play Wii Sports. The photos of journalists holding those remotes and grinning like children said more than any press release could have.

There was something genuinely exciting about the idea that a console could feel physically different—that the input itself could change what playing meant. The Wii was asking a different question than the PS3 or the Xbox 360. Those were asking: how much more? The Wii was asking: what else? That kind of lateral thinking is irresistible to me, especially when the whole industry is busy staring straight ahead at the same horizon.

In the end the Wii won the generation commercially, sold to grandmothers and physical therapy clinics, and became a punchline for the same people who’d been excited about it at E3. But for a moment in May 2006, it felt like the most interesting thing anyone was doing with a game console. I’ll take that feeling over the 599-dollar box every time.