The Top Ten Most Influential Video Game Consoles of All Time

(6) Nintendo -- Nintendo Wii

(7th Gen November 2006)

The contributions that the Wii made to the industry are very easy to see and to recognize -- and though they are indirectly the result of the long-established values that Nintendo places upon innovation and developing new ways to game, the motion-controlled gaming that the Wii introduced has quite literally changed the face of gaming as we know it today.

Back when the Wii was first released the wireless motion-based controllers that came standard with the device were often ridiculed, and even Jay Leno could not resist cracking wise about TV's and windows -- and skulls -- impacted by flying Wii 'motes -- but in the end Nintendo had the last laugh, as first Sony and its PS3, and then Microsoft and its Xbox 360 got on the motion-based controller train.

In the case of Sony the path that was taken was similar in that the motion control is still physically controller-based, but the engineers over at Microsoft clearly were thinking outside of the box with the Xbox Kinect, motion-based controls that turn the human body into the gamepad.

But motion-based controls were not the only thing that the Wii contributed to the industry -- for example there is its Mii, which translates into Avatars on the competitor platforms, and then there is a largely unrecognized service and contribution that the Wii has made to gaming...

When it was released in 2006 the Wii entered a world gaming community that was still tainted by the stigma of the social outcast with the notion stubbornly prevailing that staying home and playing video games -- even with friends in far-flung locations who could be as close as the Internet and your game console -- was still not a legitimate form of entertainment. The PS3 and Xbox 360 were then and remain today the bastions of hard core and serious gamers, and they remain the consoles of choice for competitive and online gamers, but it was clearly the Wii and Nintendo that changed the way that the world viewed gaming.

Fanboy's of the other consoles maintain that the Wii is a console for children, grandparents, and soccer moms, and that may well be true, but it was that demographic and the wide acceptance of the Wii by those groups that the experts now speculate is the seed that served as the primary catalyst behind the now open acceptance of home gaming as it is now viewed. Consoles now have a level of legitimacy in entertainment that matches that of motion pictures, and gathering with your mates online to play a game? Well, that is now considered an acceptable way to spend a Saturday evening!

Changing the way that the world views video games is one hell of an accomplishment and a major contribution to home gaming, to be sure!