Abandoned Miis come back in a homebrew Wii game

Every secondhand Wii arrives with ghosts on it. The Mii channel keeps whatever its previous households made—self-portraits, in-jokes, dead relatives, celebrities—and when the console gets resold, those little avatars go along, unclaimed. At Sickhouse, the Dutch playful art space in Enschede, artists Janne Schimmel and Rein van der Woerd built a one-day public permacomputing workshop around exactly that inheritance: participants dug forgotten Miis off secondhand consoles, “climbed inside the mind” of each one, and made a homebrew Wii game about the existential troubles those characters might face on a daily basis.

The recording of the result is up, and the game—Remember Mii—is a free download on itch, a 13MB .dol file you run from a homebrewed Wii’s SD card or drop straight into the Dolphin emulator.

“To retroactively diversify the Nintendo Wii game library,” they write. That’s a permacomputing sentence—the discipline holds that the hardware already made is the hardware worth making things for—but it’s also an archival one. A Mii might be the most personal data anyone leaves on a games console: a face, built by hand, by someone who wasn’t thinking of it as data at all. (Lord knows, the number of exes that still haunt lost Wiis.) The workshop treats that residue as a cast of characters nobody meant to donate. Music comes from Wout Martens, and seven workshop participants share the credit.

Schimmel’s whole practice runs on the afterlives of gaming hardware—a recent Permanent Beta conversation frames the artist’s repair work as refusal of planned obsolescence. The Mii has a Killscreen history, too: in 2015 we watched Nintendo push Miis out into the real world with Miitomo. A decade on, the traffic runs the other way—strangers’ Miis carried back out of the e-waste stream, one secondhand console at a time.