Wii Music
Reviled, mocked, company-destroying: Nintendo’s notorious flop deserves a reevaluation.
The apparent failure of Wii Music was really a failure of categorization: it was too weird, too freeform to be a rhythm game. It’s barely a videogame at all. But what Wii Music wants from you is simple. It wants your creativity. Seen apart from the expectations that burdened it at release, Wii Music is an unapologetic ode to play: perhaps the purest expression of the flowering design philosophy that Nintendo fully indulged in with the original Wii.
In Sebastian Faulk’s World War I novel, Birdsong, the main character Stephen hears a woman’s voice from somewhere in the house where he’s staying. Curious, he investigates, “quelling his own breathing so he would not miss a sound.”
“He heard a woman’s voice, cool and low, though made intense by desperation,” Faulks writes. “It turned to a gasp which, because of its sudden move into a higher register, was clearly one of pain.” Stephen then hears a man’s voice, then sobbing, then footsteps. He turns and hides before being found. Had he overheard a lover’s quarrel? Or abuse from the hands of a stranger? Later, on the battlefield, he and his fellow soldiers will sit in an underground tunnel, afraid: For once, no guns fired above them. Silence. Something must be wrong.
