A Life with Wii Sports

The first time I played Wii Sports was not Christmas morning, lovingly tearing away layers of wrapping, or even a class party in elementary school surrounded by friends. It was no birthday, or reward for good grades, or even the result of weeks of saved allowance. It was just another bleak summer afternoon at my grandma’s house.

My brothers and I had been sent to play outside, but then forced back in due to blistering Texas heat and simply left to watch as dad wrestled with grandma’s new television set. When he was about done with that one, he struggled to carry her old CRT TV into the dining room – now we had no reason to complain about football being on during the holidays, he told us. Clamoring over the TV, we were pulled out of the moment by a ring at the doorbell – my cousin, his old hand-me-down Nintendo Wii in hand, practically plastic gold.

We’d never been able to afford something like that, and the thought of it even just being at Grammy’s house was enough to excite us. Dad moved from one task to the next, unraveling cables as we scrambled together, poring over Gamecube and Wii disc alike as he attempted to master technology, melding the old CRT with the seemingly new, modern console. Then the TV began to glow and my life was changed forever.

There are a few things that make Wii Sports, as a game separated from nostalgia, special. For starters, the Wii’s motion controls. These were the big gimmick of the time, and Wii Sports was far from the only sports game to utilize them, but it is the only one remembered nearly as fondly. Nobody talks about Playstation Sports Champions or Kinect Sports with anywhere near the same regard.

These competing systems were fairly complicated in comparison to the Wii – the Playstation Move had similar controllers, but the buttons were tiny and awkwardly placed, and the controllers relied on a convoluted camera system that needed near-constant calibration in a dim room. The Kinect maybe simplified its system the most, embracing its ability to act as an extension of the body, but the majority of Kinect games were aimed at children, and to a kid it just makes more sense to grab a controller and play than waste time setting up a camera sensor. Nintendo’s Miis also granted an extra layer of charm, one absent on the Playstation and lacking on the 360. These player avatars were simple yet detailed enough to pretty accurately portray anyone, somehow with enough flexibility to embrace players’ creativity and let them have fun with it.

There’s no specific memory of my second time playing Wii Sports because the rest of my childhood bleeds into a lifetime of Wii Sports. Every Christmas, birthday, you name it. If we were at Grammy’s, the majority of our time was spent on the Wii. And then we got our own family edition for Christmas, and suddenly it was weekly, sometimes even daily.

I don’t remember when I stopped playing. One Christmas we got a Wii U, but even then the Wii stayed plugged in right next to it. No matter how I rack my brain, I just can’t seem to recall when it happened. Maybe we outgrew it. Maybe we wanted to be taken seriously, teens and pre-teens we were, swapping our childish games for games just as childish on our shitty laptops. Either way, in a bag it went, tucked under mom’s dresser, along with all the other games that made us who we were. At some point I went from holding a Wiimote to wearing a uniform and I didn’t even notice it happen.

Two big things happened in 2020. First off my dad had a bad car wreck which led to him sleeping downstairs, meaning no one was paying attention to how late I was up. And then, y’know, the big thing of 2020, Covid-19, the reason I spent my sophomore year at home and watched my friends graduate virtually.

Between these two events, I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands. Inevitably, I found myself digging through my parents’ junk, unveiling that time capsule layered with years of neglect. Throughout all of 2020, I played Wii Sports. The next year, after days of huddling together for warmth when all of Texas froze over, I played Wii Sports. I started carrying the Wii with me to school, playing during free periods and whenever I could convince a teacher to let us hook it up. I played alone, I played with classmates, I played with friends, siblings, I even made my parents play a little. I spent most of my graduation party playing Wii Sports. And then I went to college.

To say the transition was rough would be an understatement. I took 15 credits my first semester, and in my second I added a part-time job. I couldn’t drive, and my dorm was on the opposite side of the campus from everything else. Between class, work, studying, and the commute back and forth, I found myself with little free time. And so the Wii sat, gathering dust once more in a box under my bed. After a while, I just couldn’t take it. I missed those whooshes and cracks, the epic highs and lows of baseball and tennis and boxing, something to come home to and play after a long day.

So I bought a copy of Switch Sports.

Right away something was wrong. Not like broken, or ugly, or rotten wrong, but a sort of uncanny wrong. Gone was the familiar fanfare that had scored most of my childhood, boring summers and important moments alike. The new theme wasn’t bad, but it felt so impersonal and uninspired by comparison.Wii Sports’ theme was lively, upbeat – Switch Sports was still both of those, but it felt so corporate. Gone was the charm, the almost scrappy appeal of the Wii’s rough edges. The Switch is here to stay – rounded, perfect, but hollow, a future pristine and almost clinically sterile, lacking in both the frustrating and nostalgic imperfections of the past.

For the past sixteen years I’ve always had a weird habit of keeping a Mii for each distinct era of my life. I made my first Mii around four years old on my grandma’s Wii, and over the course of my life I’ve made many more. On our family Wii, on my brother’s 3DS, on my own Year Of Luigi 3DS when I got it. I have numerous Miis stored on that Wii and 3DS, even on my Switch – Miis of me in middle school, in high school, in the weird stage of life I’m in right now. A Nintendo sports game without them, replaced by what feels like an odd impostor just wasn’t the same. When I shut my Switch down that night, I was suddenly violently aware of the passage of time.

I haven’t played it since.

I didn’t hate Switch Sports. In fact, I actually really enjoyed it. I spent a lot of time playing the chambara mini-game, which felt fun and distinct enough from Wii Sports Resort’s sword mini-game to be its own thing. This might be a bit sacrilegious, but I even found myself preferring the Switch version of tennis. The Wii version certainly has more character, but Switch Sports tennis was just so fluid and responsive. Maybe the worst part is just how good the game felt to play – my issues with it have nothing to do with gameplay. It really is a fun game. But the entire time I felt almost haunted, surrounded by fragments and echoes of my beloved Wii Sports. As if the game itself was a strange impostor, so much like the thing I loved and yet so different at the same time.

At the end of last spring, it became clear that I would no longer be able to continue my academic career. College for me was solely paid for with FAFSA and work – due to a rework of the system, I wouldn’t be getting the aid I needed. Even at a public state school, my parents didn’t have any money to contribute, let alone cover however many years I had left. I packed my things and sobbed, and when the Wii was boxed up once again I wept even harder.

I went back to my hometown, back to my parents house, back in the closet. I had had it all – an academic future, a chosen name, freedom – and it had just as quickly been ripped away from me by fate. I had failed.

Over that long summer, I wrote my first piece for Unwinnable, but beyond that I mostly applied for job after job and just… waited. I hardly ate, I hardly showered, I cried myself to sleep. As far as I was concerned, my entire life, the future I had worked so hard for, was over forever. On the upside, I had a lot of free time for games I had been neglecting. I played Outer Wilds, Max Payne, and a hell of a lot of Final Fantasy XIV, but I still found myself thinking of that damn box.

Prior to that summer, I had planned on transferring out of state, moving closer to more of my friends. The worst part of everything was the crushing loneliness, thinking I would never see my closest friends in person again. When it got worse, when I hit my lowest, I hooked up the Wii. I played Wii Sports.

At the start of the fall, just a few days after finally getting hired for a job, I had a dream that put everything into perspective. In the morning, I cried and called my friends – I had never had so much hope for my life.

And Wii Sports, through it all, has been there for me. Maybe it is just a gimmicky sports game to some – but to me it’s everything. It’s comfort when I need it the most, it’s a familiar place I can always return to, it’s what home feels like.

When shit hits the fan, when my life feels like it’s falling apart, I always return to Wii Sports, and I find myself returning to that dream. It’s still so clear; someday, no matter how far away, I have that dream to look forward to. Someday, I’ll be in a place of my own, huddled around a TV with all of my friends, laughing, maybe drinking, and playing Wii Sports. And everything will be okay.

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Quinn Quimby is a Texas-based writer, philosopher, and video essayist. Check out their other work at https://www.youtube.com/@Quimbles/videos.