Wii

All that being said, I don’t think we’ll ever have a launch quite like the Wii’s again. One of the smartest business decisions anyone at Nintendo ever made was to package Wii Sports with every Wii. One of the biggest hurdles video games must overcome is teaching someone how to play. The more complicated a game is, the more likely you are to lose someone in all the minutiae. Some of the best marketing Nintendo ever did was the “Wii Would Like To Play” commercials that showed Nintendo employees bringing the system and its motion-controlled remotes into different families’ homes and showing them playing Wii Sports. As moms, dads, kids, and grandparents all swing the Wii-motes around and their movements are reflected on screen, everyone instantly understands what the system is about. Somehow, this pack-in collection of motion-controlled, sports-based games was a bigger system-seller than the new Zelda that launched alongside the console, and the possibilities seemed so endless. Eventually, the Wii became a dumping ground for shovelware, and Nintendo’s decision to stick with the device’s name for brand recognition with the Wii U ended up biting it in the ass. Still, unless Nintendo or another company comes up with something so intuitive that even your grandmother is hopping on to play, no one is catching lightning in a bottle this way ever again. — Kenneth Shepard