Rolling the rock down the lanes of your favorite bowling alley--'scuse me, bowling center--is a time-honored social event. Even if you're no good at it, everybody cheers, even when your ball knocks down just one pin.

The Nintendo Wii brings that fun home in a compact, $250 video game system that has taken the industry by storm. More than 1 million units have been sold since the Wii launched in November. The systems come with a free game called Wii Sports.

Wii Sports lets you compete in tennis, baseball, boxing and bowling by grabbing the TV remote-size controller and swinging it like a tennis racket, baseball bat, boxing glove or bowling ball.

For At Play's bowling issue, we fired up Wii Sports' bowling game (www.wii.com). It is set up like a regular game of bowling; you can play alone or with up to three other people. Suffice to say it's a blast, but it leaves out some features of real-world bowling: You don't have to drive in the cold; you don't have to wait for a lane; and you don't have to slip into rented bowling shoes.


The console was originally conceived in 2001, as the Nintendo GameCube was first seeing release. According to an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto,  the concept involved focusing on a new form of player interaction. "The consensus was that power isn't everything for a console. Too many powerful consoles can't coexist. It's like having only ferocious dinosaurs. They might fight and hasten their own extinction.

Two years later, engineers and designers were brought together to further develop the concept. By 2005, the controller interface had taken form, but a public showing at that year's E³ was withdrawn. Miyamoto stated that "we had some troubleshooting to do. So we decided not to reveal the controller and instead we displayed just the console  Satoru Iwata would later unveil and demonstrate the Wii Remote at the September Tokyo Game Show.

The Nintendo DS is stated to have influenced the Wii design. Designer Ken'ichiro Ashida noted "We had the DS on our minds as we worked on the Wii. We thought about copying the DS's touch-panel interface and even came up with a prototype." The idea was eventually rejected, with the notion that the two gaming systems would be identical. Miyamoto also expressed that "if the DS had flopped, we might have taken the Wii back to the drawing board."