Following up on my last post about the dev tools for Wii, here is a cool link I found on Robin's blog. I'm not one to cruise the sites of the hardware manufacturers, but I'm glad I did.
This reminds me of me my first Wii experience which, sentimental as it is, I will share with you.
At E3, me and LP managed to con our way past the insane Wii line by going to the developer support desk and flashing our sexy Ubisoft business cards. I guess Producer + Creative Director + Ubisoft (is it 7 Wii launch titles?) was enough to get an escort past the line (unless it was LP's sexy haircut?).
Inside the zoo of all that was Wii, I spied all sorts of wonders; from guys playing tennis with an invisible ball, to chicks 50-50ing rails with a flick of the wrist, to a full fledged Tam-Tam Jam that was mercifully free of stinky unshowered hippies. It was like a scene from Harry Potter, with thousands of apprentices fumbling about with their wands for the very first time, and accidentally summoning, zapping, animating, or mesmerizing themselves in all directions all at once.
They had these little booths set up in a ring. Each booth would hold maybe a dozen people crammed in, with a Wii set-up in each booth. There was a Zelda booth and a Mario booth and a Metroid booth and a Red Steel booth - everything you'd expect, and each one overflowing with giddy gamers waiting their turn.
But one booth in particular caught my attention. It was running - well, honestly, I don't know what the game was... it was the one where you conduct an orchestra as (not) seen at the 37 second mark of this video. I don't even know if it's a game - maybe it's just a tech demo (but I hope its a game). There was a huge crowd, bigger than at the other booths, and everyone was clustered around staring in amazement, cheering, laughing, and I had to elbow my way in there to get a look at whichever hotshot young hip japanese kid was rocking out like a post-modernist Kent Nagano.
But it wasn't some hip young gamer getting his groove on to the adoration of thirty-plus twenty-somethings, it was a mid-forties overweight balding buyer from some middle-american mega-mart. He was a dishevelled businessman in a second-rate suit with his tie out of place, sweat marks under his armpits and a name tag that said 'Hi My Name is' something pleasantly forgettable. He was a totally average, bland, uninteresting, boring, generic human. The kind of guy who you'd see standing behind you in line at the bank.
And there he was, conducting an orchestra in front of a booth full of exhilerated onlookers who were cheering for him, and he had the biggest fucking smile on his face that I think I've ever seen on anyone, ever. They say the average person is more scared of public speaking than of dying, and this guy was certainly average. Yet here he was, not speaking, per se, but performing, with a huge crowd of people worshipping him. I bet this guy felt like shit when he couldn't even gather the courage to ask Tina-Marie to the prom in 1978, but was thankful he didn't two weeks later when he saw her in the arms of runningback Tom Slade after the big homecoming game. I bet he shuffled through life being an ordinary guy and dealing with all of the nightmares that that entails. I bet he never imagined when he took his job at Mega-Mart that it would bring him anything more than a paycheck for his wife and kids - who he loves. I bet that even though he orders hundreds of thousands - even millions of games a year - that he probably hasn't actually played one since Space Invaders (when he sullenly stuffed his hands in his pockets and followed his friends to the pizza parlour after the homecoming game). I bet that no one ever cheered for him even once in his life. Ever.
He'll buy a Wii. And probably his wife will raise an eyebrow when he brings it home and make him feel a little bit stupid for wasting their money on a toy. And he'll probably have a hard time convincing her to just try it, just once. But she will. And she will probably feel something she has never felt before either. And maybe - and I won't even assert this one, I'll just say maybe - maybe it will become a new part of the life that they share together.
I still wonder why they changed the name to Wii.
Wii are family.
Posted by: Patrick | October 22, 2006 at 06:12 PM