Game · 2006–2013
A tech demo bundled with the console in most territories, which became the best-selling single-platform game ever released and the reason a great many households owned a Wii at all.
Wii Sports shipped 82.9 million copies, a figure that places it among the highest-selling games ever made and, for a single platform, at the top. The caveat is inseparable from the number: it was included in the box with the Wii in most regions, so its sales track console sales almost exactly. That caveat is usually raised to diminish the figure, and it is more interesting than that. Bundling is a decision about what a machine is for, and Nintendo had made this bet before — Tetris with the Game Boy is the canonical case. The Wii's central proposition was motion control, which is difficult to explain and trivial to demonstrate, and no amount of marketing conveys it as efficiently as putting the remote in someone's hand and having them swing it at a tennis ball. Wii Sports exists to be that demonstration. Its five sports are deliberately shallow, its controls map to physical gestures that need no explanation, and it is built around a group of people in a room rather than one player. The effect was to make the console legible to buyers who had never bought one. The Wii went on to sell 101.63 million units, and a substantial part of that is attributable to a game that customers did not choose, could not buy separately in most territories, and frequently never replaced with anything else.