Shigeru Miyamoto says the Wii is special to him due to how it expanded gaming

The GameCube is a platform much loved by those who owned it. If anything, the platform has only grown more appreciated as time has gone on, and is looked back on quite fondly nowadays. Still, there’s no denying that the GameCube wasn’t exactly a powerhouse in the sales department, and its modest reception at retail set Nintendo down a very important path.

Nintendo new they had to do something different to reignite sales around the world, and it would take some radical thinking to achieve it. Nintendo set out to see where the market was, where it was heading, and how Nintendo could perhaps steer things in a different direction. It was that analysis of gamers and gaming as a whole that led to the Wii.

The Wii is one of Nintendo’s most popular platforms ever, and it helped the company reach what’s now known as “Nintendo-like” profits. The console was a runaway success the likes of which Nintendo hadn’t seen in the home console space, and it forever changed how the company operates. Turns out the Wii also happens to be one of Miyamoto’s proudest moments.

In a talk Shigeru Miyamoto gave at the opening of the Nintendo Museum in Japan, the legendary developer spent some time talking about the Wii. Nintendo’s motion-controlled system burst into the market with an absolute fury that reshaped the game industry, and what it managed to pull off made it something really special to Miyamoto. You can see his comments on the platform and its achievements below.

The Wii is special to me. At the time, I and [former Nintendo president Satoru] Iwata felt that games were becoming something specifically for gamers and we wanted to change that by creating something that could be experienced by anybody.

That was the driving force behind the Wii, and it was something that we were kind of able to actually accomplish. Looking at the photos of families playing together, it makes me happy to think that the population of people that play games increased because of the Wii.

[Shigeru Miyamoto]