Wii Sports is a sports compilation developed by Nintendo EAD and bundled with the Nintendo Wii at launch in 2006. Using the Wii Remote's motion controls, players swing, pitch, putt, punch, and bowl across five sports — and in doing so, introduced video games to an entirely new audience.
Wii Sports was developed by Nintendo EAD and released alongside the Nintendo Wii in November 2006, bundled with the console in most regions. It shipped with five sports — Tennis, Baseball, Bowling, Golf, and Boxing — each designed to showcase the Wii Remote's motion sensing capabilities in the most immediately accessible way possible.
The game's genius was its simplicity. Each sport stripped away complexity to leave a single physical gesture: swing the remote like a tennis racket, roll it forward like a bowling ball, punch it like a boxing glove. There were no button combinations to learn, no tutorials to sit through. The motion-to-action feedback loop was so intuitive that players who had never touched a video game could pick up a Wii Remote and compete within seconds.
Wii Sports did something almost no game before it had managed: it made video games approachable to people who had long since decided games weren't for them. It appeared in retirement homes, hospital rehabilitation programmes, and family living rooms across the world. Bowling nights between grandparents and grandchildren became a cultural phenomenon. The game sold — or was bundled with — over 82 million Wii consoles, making it one of the best-selling games of all time.
Wii Sports is ranked #30 on Rolling Stone's 2025 list of the 50 Greatest Video Games of All Time. It won Time magazine's Game of the Year for 2006 and is widely credited with expanding the definition of who a video game player could be — a shift whose effects are still felt in the design of casual and mobile games today.