10 Video Games That Had No Right Being This Good

It’s difficult to overstate just how influential Wii Sports was. Simply by virtue of being bundled in with Nintendo’s incredibly successful Wii, it become one of the most-purchased video games ever. It also ensured that most people’s first experiences of the console were brilliantly silly fun.

Wii Sports, in a very real way, encapsulated everything the console was about. The whole family could grab the Wiimote and throw their ball in bowling, swing their racket in tennis, their fists in boxing, their bat in baseball or their club in golf.

There have been few get-everyone-together-over-the-holidays experiences like it.

In hindsight, Wii Sports is a very simple and featureless package. At the time, though, we didn’t know that the slightest wave of the Wiimote was enough to hit that tennis ball. We all got fully into the experience and waved our arms as animatedly as the Williams sisters.

The revolutionary nature of the motion controls and the pure accessibility of it all made Wii Sports far, far, far more than the sum of its parts.