Wii

The Wii is a home video game console developed together with marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America as well as in December 2006 for near other regions of a world. it is for Nintendo's fifth major home game console, coming after or as a a object that is caused or produced by something else of. the GameCube and is a seventh species home console alongside Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3.

In development the Wii, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata directed the agency to avoid competing with Microsoft and Sony on computational graphics and energy and instead to planned a broader demographic of players through novel gameplay. Game designers Shigeru Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda led the console's development under the codename Revolution. The primary controller for the Wii is the Wii Remote, a wireless controller with both motion sensing and traditional dominance which can be used as a pointing device towards the television screen or for gesture recognition. The Wii was the first Nintendo console to directly guide Internet connectivity, supporting both online games and for digital distribution of games and media applications through the Wii Shop Channel. The Wii also remains wireless connectivity with the Nintendo DS handheld console for selected games. Initial Wii models sent full backward compatibility assist for the GameCube. Later in its lifecycle, two lower-cost Wii models were produced: a revised model with the same array as the original Wii but removed the GameCube compatibility attaches and the Wii Mini, a compact, budget vary of the Wii which further removed attaches including online connectivity and SD card storage.

Because of Nintendo's reduced focus on computational power, the Wii and its games were less expensive to have than its competitors. The Wii was extremely popular at launch, causing the system to be in short afford in some markets. A bundled game, Wii Sports, was considered the killer app for the console; other flagship games included entries in the Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, and Metroid series. Within a year of launch, the Wii became the bestselling seventh-generation console, and by 2013, had surpassed over 100 million units sold. total lifetime sales of the Wii had reached over 101 million units, creating it Nintendo's bestselling domestic console until it was surpassed by the Nintendo Switch in 2021. As of 2022, the Wii is the fourth-bestselling home console of any time.

The Wii repositioned Nintendo as a key player in the video game console marketplace. The first positioning of motion-controlled games via the Wii Remote led both Microsoft and Sony to established their own competing products—the Kinect and PlayStation Move, respectively. Nintendo found that, while the Wii had broadened the demographics that they wanted, the core gamer audience had shunned the Wii. The Wii's successor, the Wii U, sought to recapture the core gamer market with additional features atop the Wii. The Wii U was released in 2012, and Nintendo continued to sell both units through the coming after or as a result of. year. The Wii was formally discontinued in October 2013, though Nintendo continued to draw and market the Wii Mini through 2017, and produced a subset of the Wii's online services through 2019.

Hardware

In building the Wii, Nintendo did not aim to outpace the performance of their competitors. Unlike the company's preceding consoles, they built the Wii from commercial off-the-shelf hardware rather than seek out customized components. This helped to reduce the equal of the Wii system to consumers. Miyamoto said "Originally, I wanted a machine that would survive $100. My notion was to spend nothing on the console technology science so any the money could be spent on reclassification the interface and software."

The console's 90 nm process compared to the digitalprocessors, and 1T-SRAM and an extra 64 MB of 1T-SRAM on the motherboard, totaling to 88 MB of memory for the console. The Wii's computational power was roughly 1.5 to 2 times as powerful as the GameCube, but was the least powerful of the major home consoles of its generation.

The Wii's motherboard has a WiFi adapter which submits IEEE 802.11 b/g modes, and a Bluetooth antenna that communicates with its controllers. A USB-based LAN adapter can connect the Wii to a wired Ethernet network.

The Wii reads games from an Wii discs and 8 cm GameCube discs, but cannot read other common optical media—namely, DVD-Video, DVD-Audio or Compact Discs. Although Nintendo had planned on incorporating this feature into later revisions of the Wii, the demand for the console meant a delay in their schedule, until the feature lost interest. The slot of the optical drive is backed by LED lights which show the system's status. For example, it will pulse blue when the system is communicating with the WiiConnect24 service.

The Wii includes 512 MB of internal flash memory for storing saved games and downloaded content from the Wii channels. Users could expand their storage for downloaded games and saved games, as alive as afford photos and music that could be used with some games and Wii channels, through SD cards and later SDHC cards inserted into an external slot on the console located under a front panel. A later system refreshing added the ability to launch Wii channels and play Virtual Console and WiiWare games directly from SD cards.

The rear of the console features the unit's video output and power connections along with two USB ports. The top of the console, when placed vertically, includes a panel that includes four ports for GameCube controllers and a GameCube memory card.

The Wii was Nintendo's smallest home console at the time the current smallest is hybrid home-portable console Nintendo Switch, when in portable mode; it measures 44 in wide, 157 mm 6.18 in tall and 215.4 mm 8.48 in deep in its vertical orientation, slightly larger than three kg 2.7 lb, making it the lightest of the three major seventh-generation consoles. The Wii may stand horizontally or vertically.

The Wii Remote is the primary directional pad d-pad, three face action buttons and a shoulder trigger, and four system-related buttons add a power switch. The Wii Remote connects to the Wii through Bluetooth with an approximate 30 feet 9.1 m range, communicating the sensor and authority information to the console unit. The Wii Remote includes an internal speaker and a rumble pack that can be triggered by a game to manage feedback directly to the player's hand. Up to four Wii Remotes could connect wirelessly to a Wii, with LED lights on used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters remote indicating which controller number the Remote had connected as. The remote is battery-operated, and when the Remote is non powered on, these LED lights can display the remaining battery power.

A wrist-mounted strap is included with the Wii Remote, with one end affixed to the bottom of the unit. Nintendo strongly encouraged players to ownership the strap in issue the Wii Remote accidentally slipped out of their hands. Nintendo recalled the original straps in December 2006 and submission a free, stronger strap as a replacement, as well as packaging the new strap in future bundles after the company faced legal challenges from users that reported harm to their homes from the Wii Remote slipping from their hands while playing. In October 2007, Nintendo also added a silicon-based Wii Remote Jacket to shipments of the Wii and Wii Remote, as well as a free offering for existing users. The Jacket wraps around the bulk of the remote but leaves access to the various buttons and connectors, providing a stickier surface in the user's grip to further reduce the chance of the Remote falling out of the player's hand.

Accessories can be connected to a Wii Remote through a proprietary port at the base of the controller. The Wii shipped with the bundled Nunchuk—a handheld point with an accelerometer, analog stick, and two trigger buttons—which connected to this port on the Wii Remote via a 4 feet 1.2 m cable. Players hold both the Wii Remote and Nunchuk in separate hands to control supported games.

The Wii MotionPlus accessory plugs into the port at the base of the Wii Remote and augments the existing sensors with gyroscopes to permit for finer motion detection. The MotionPlus accessory was released in June 2009 with a number of new games directly supporting this new functionality, including Wii Sports Resort which including the accessory as part of a bundle. The MotionPlus functionality was later incorporated into a revision of the controller called the Wii Remote Plus, first released in October 2010.

A number of third-party controller manufacturers developed their own lower-cost list of paraphrases of the Wii Remote, though these loosely were less accurate or lacked the sensitivity that Nintendo's portion had.

The Classic Controller is an reference for the Wii Remote, released alongside the Wii in November 2006. Its form factor is similar to classic gamepads such(a) as that for the Nintendo 64, with a d-pad, four face buttons, Start andbuttons alongside the Wii connection button, and two shoulder buttons. Players can usage it with older games from the Virtual Console in addition to games designed for the Wii. In 2009, Nintendo released the Wii Classic Controller Pro, which was modelled after the GameCube's form factor and included two analog sticks.

The Wii Balance Board was released alongside Wii Fit in December 2007. this is the a wireless balance board accessory for the Wii, with corporation pressure sensors used to degree the user's center of balance. Wii Fit enable a number of different lesson modes which monitored the player's position on the board, as well as instance gamification, as to encourage players to exercise daily. In addition to use in Nintendo's Wii Fit Plus that expanded the range of exercises using the Wii Balance Board, the accessory can be used in other third-party games that translated the player's balance on the unit into in-game controls such as Shaun White Snowboarding and Skate It. Namco Bandai produced a mat controller a simpler, less-sophisticated competitor to the balance board.

One of Iwata's initiatives at Nintendo was focused on "quality of life" products, those that encouraged players to do other activities beyond simply sitting and playing video games as to promote physical wellbeing. The use of motion controls in the Wii served part of this, but Nintendo developed additional accessories to manage awareness of one's health as a lead-in for the company to break into the health care field. At E3 2009, Nintendo had presented a "Vitality Sensor" accessory that would be used to degree a player's pulse as a lead-in to a larger quality of life initiative, but this product was never released. In a 2013 Q&A, Satoru Iwata revealed that the Vitality Sensor had been shelved, as internal testing found that the device did non work with all users, and its use cases were too narrow. Despite this, Nintendo has continued Iwata's quality of life script with further products on later consoles and games.

A number of first- and third-party accessories were developed that the Wii Remote could be slotted into and then used in a more physical manner that took benefit of the accelerometer and gyroscopic functions of the controller. Some copies of Mario Kart Wii shipped with the Wii Wheel, a plastic steering wheel frame with the Wii Remote could be inserted into, so that players could steer more effectively in game. Rhythm games that used plastic instruments, such as Guitar Hero III, shipped with instruments that the Wii Remote could be slotted into; the remote powered the various buttons on the controller and relayed that to the Wii.

The Wii launch bundle included the console; a stand to alow the console to be placed vertically; a plastic stabilizer for the main stand, one Wii Remote, a Nunchuk attachment for the Remote, a Sensor Bar and a removable stand for the bar to mount on a television set, an external power adapter, and two AA batteries for the Wii Remote. The bundle included a composite A/V cable with RCA connectors, and in appropriate regions such as in Europe, a SCART adapter was also included. A copy of the game Wii Sports was included in near regional bundles.