Word: fitful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...introduced a few years ago. The magic is in its handheld motion sensors, which let players duplicate the action of throwing a ball or swinging a club or racquet. Wii bumped up Nintendo's sales 73%, to $16 billion, last year. It is outselling rivals 3 to 1, and Fit is driving Wii: more than 2 million Fit units have been sold since the game's December launch in Japan, and its U.S. debut is expected to drive Nintendo to another bust-out year...
...With Fit, Miyamoto is abandoning those familiar faces--it's about time, say his critics--and taking gamers in a new direction. Although many people dread weighing themselves, the slight, 137-lb. (62 kg) designer hatched the idea for Wii Fit when he realized he got a kick out of charting his own weight on a piece of paper taped to the wall: "My whole family took an interest. Seeing how that was able to excite the people in my family, I thought, Oh, this is a really neat experience that I'd like to bring to other people...
...breakthrough with Fit came when the developers decided to add motion sensors to each corner of the balance board and change its original square shape to a rectangle. This allowed them to add balance tests inspired by Seitai--a Japanese healing therapy that focuses on posture--and let the board double as a snowboard for use in the slalom, one of Wii Fit's coolest minigames...
...veritable Walt Disney of video games, Miyamoto can afford to upset the creative balance. He admits that devising Fit was a lot less fun than playing it. "There tends to be a lot of nervousness about working on a product like this. Video games have a lot of expectations, and developers tend to have stress to meet those," he told me. Miyamoto draws from his personal life to create new games. His love of dogs led to the virtual-pet title Nintendogs, and his gardening hobby grew into the carrot-shaped Pikmin in the eponymous GameCube...
...With Fit, though, Miyamoto is showing that even the mundane can be a source of entertainment: "When people look back at Wii Fit, they won't look at it in comparison to Mario but as unique interactive entertainment that really introduced the masses to what that can be. While there is appeal in creating living, breathing fantasy worlds, I also see the experience of interacting with your reality in a way that you normally can't as a great source of entertainment." He is now working on a music game. It's due later this year, even if it takes...