--- title: "Nintendo Wii, the Small White Box That Won by Skipping the Spec Race" url: https://quietmenace.com/tech/nintendo-wii-remote-history/ author: Quiet Menace Editors section: Tech published: 2026-11-02 updated: 2026-11-02 topics: Tech History, Gaming, Japan, Industrial Design --- # Nintendo Wii, the Small White Box That Won by Skipping the Spec Race > Twenty years ago this month, Nintendo launched the weakest console of its generation, sized it to three DVD cases and handed players a television remote. It outsold both rivals. On November 19, 2006, Nintendo put the Wii on sale in the United States for $249.99, with a copy of Wii Sports in the box. Two days earlier Sony had launched the PlayStation 3 there at $499 and $599. The Xbox 360 had been out for a year at $299 and $399. Nintendo's machine was the cheapest of the three, the smallest and, by a wide margin, the least powerful. Within a year it was the best selling console of its generation. The Wii turns 20 later this month, and its story is worth retelling because it is a design story more than a technology story. Nintendo won by deciding what not to build. ## Off the tech roadmap After the GameCube launched in 2001, Nintendo started work on its successor with an unusual brief. According to the history collected in the [Wii's Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii), Satoru Iwata, who became president in May 2002, wanted hardware that would appeal to people who did not play games at all, and in 2003 he told the hardware chief Genyo Takeda to go off the usual technology roadmap. Shigeru Miyamoto took charge of a new controller. The company had already licensed motion sensing patents from Gyration, a maker of wireless motion sensing computer mice, in September 2001. The thinking was not new at Nintendo. The engineer Gunpei Yokoi had built the [Game Boy](https://quietmenace.com/tech/nintendo-game-boy-history/) on cheap, mature parts and won against brighter, costlier rivals. The Wii applied the same logic to the living room. Its processor, an IBM chip called Broadway, ran at 729 MHz and was built on the same PowerPC architecture as the GameCube's. Its graphics chip was an updated version of the GameCube's. The result was a console roughly one and a half to two times as powerful as its predecessor and the least powerful of the three major consoles of 2006. It also did not play DVDs. Nintendo reasoned that most homes already had a player and that skipping the feature saved on patent licensing. ## Three DVD cases tall The box itself was designed to be let into the house. At E3 in May 2005, Iwata held the prototype, then still called Revolution, above his head with one hand to show how small it was. Standing on its end, the finished console measured 44 millimeters wide, 157 millimeters tall and 215.4 millimeters deep, a little bigger than three DVD cases stacked together, which is reportedly the reference Iwata used. A small box ran cooler and drew less power, and Nintendo believed parents would be more willing to give a small, attractive object a place under the television. Nintendo showed the console in black, silver, lime green and red before launch, then sold it only in white for its first two and a half years. Black arrived in Japan in August 2009. Next to the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, a white slab with a single glowing slot looked less like a gaming machine than a piece of kitchen electronics, and comparisons to the original iPod followed. If you have read our piece on [how Sony designed the PlayStation](https://quietmenace.com/tech/sony-playstation-design-history/), the contrast is plain. Sony dressed its consoles to look like the future. Nintendo dressed the Wii to look harmless. ## A remote, not a gamepad The real object of the Wii was the controller. Development of a motion controller began alongside the console, and Nintendo first commissioned Gyration to build one. The result, the Gyropod, was a conventional gamepad whose right half broke away for motion control. By late 2004 or early 2005, according to the [Wii Remote's Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_Remote), Nintendo had settled on a one handed wand instead. Miyamoto had looked at mobile phones and car navigation controllers for ideas, and an early prototype resembled a cell phone. A version with a touchscreen was rejected because it would have made the home console too much like the Nintendo DS. The finished Wii Remote is 147 millimeters long, 36.2 millimeters wide and 30.8 millimeters thick. It talks to the console over Bluetooth and reads infrared light from a Sensor Bar placed above or below the television, which lets it work as a pointer as well as a motion sensor. It can be held sideways like an old Nintendo pad. For E3 2006, Nintendo renamed its Start and Select buttons plus and minus and relabeled two face buttons 1 and 2, so the layout would read like the keypad of a television remote. The power button could turn the console on and off from the sofa. Everything about the object said that you already knew how to use it. The name followed the same idea. The two lowercase letters in Wii were meant to look like two people standing side by side, and the word was chosen to sound like we. The name drew widespread mockery. It stuck anyway. ![Wii consoles in white and black lined up above a row of Wii Remotes on a wooden table](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1687525683523-b5b7b7683016?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *Wii consoles in white and the later black, above a row of Wii Remotes. Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash* ## What Nintendo's own numbers show Nintendo still publishes lifetime sales for every console on its [investor relations site](https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/hard_soft/index.html). We took its figures as of June 30, 2026 for the four home consoles from the GameCube onward and divided software by hardware to get games sold per console. The arithmetic is ours. | Console | Consoles sold | Games sold | Games per console | |---|---|---|---| | GameCube (2001) | 21.74 million | 208.58 million | 9.6 | | Wii (2006) | 101.63 million | 921.85 million | 9.1 | | Wii U (2012) | 13.56 million | 103.60 million | 7.6 | | Nintendo Switch (2017) | 156.59 million | 1,561.95 million | 10.0 | Two things stand out. The Wii sold 4.7 times as many consoles as the GameCube, yet its owners bought slightly fewer games each. That fits the strategy. The Wii brought in households that bought a console for Wii Sports and a handful of other games, people who had never owned a GameCube at all. And its successor, the Wii U, sold barely 13 percent as many units, which shows how much of the Wii's audience was attached to the idea of the Wii rather than to Nintendo. Against its rivals, the gap is just as clear. Game Developer's [launch report](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/nintendo-confirms-nov-19-250-wii-u-s-launch), then published as Gamasutra, put the Wii at $250 with Wii Sports included and its games at $50, ten dollars under standard Xbox 360 titles. By our arithmetic the Wii's launch price was half the cheaper PlayStation 3 and about 42 percent of the dearer one. The PlayStation 3 went on to sell about 87.4 million units by Wikipedia's count, roughly 14 million fewer than the Wii. ## What it left behind The Wii was discontinued in October 2013, though the cheaper Wii Mini stayed in production for a while longer. Its motion controls pushed Microsoft into the Kinect and Sony into PlayStation Move, and the Wii Remote found a successor in the Joy-Con of the Switch. The machine that beat its numbers is the Switch, which surpassed the Wii in 2021 and now leads the table above. Plenty of Wiis are still in cupboards, and they are cheap secondhand. If you buy one, look for the early model that also plays GameCube discs, check that the Sensor Bar is in the box, and buy a spare Wii Remote, because Wii Sports bowling is still best with two players. Then put it under the television, where it was designed to live. For more from the archive, see the [Tech section](https://quietmenace.com/tech/) and our [gaming hub](https://quietmenace.com/topics/gaming/). ![A Wii U console beside a red and white Wii Remote decorated with a Toad mushroom, on a shelf](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1707701469890-ceab471b11a6?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *A Wii U, the console that followed the Wii, with a Wii Remote in Toad colors. The Wii U kept the Wii Remote. Photo by Luis Chávez on Unsplash* --- Filed under: [Tech History](https://quietmenace.com/topics/tech-history/), [Gaming](https://quietmenace.com/topics/gaming/), [Japan](https://quietmenace.com/topics/japan/), [Industrial Design](https://quietmenace.com/topics/industrial-design/) Hero image: Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash (Unsplash License)