The Wii is the gaming system Apple would’ve, should’ve created

Posted by Dennis Sellers Jan 20, 2009 at 3:00am

Now that Apple has Apple is trademarking “OS X” (without the word “Mac”) there’s talk that Apple may be building a gaming console. I’m dubious. Besides, with its Wii system, Nintendo has built a gaming console that could’ve been created by Apple itself.

My kiddos bought me a Wii for Christmas (though, strangely, they seem to play it more than I do) and I love it. It’s innovative, extremely user friendly, outrageously fun and totally unlike anything that preceded it. And, if memory serves me correctly, many pundits predicted that the Wii would flop because it wouldn’t appeal to the “hard core” gamers.

That prediction, like many about Apple, was totally off base. In fact, before 2008, no video game system had ever been purchased by 10 million Americans in a single year. But according to independent sales data released last week by the NPD Group, the Wii console from Nintendo did just that, even during these tough economic times, with 2008 unit sales of 10.17 million.

The Nintendo DS portable handheld system came in a close second, with 2008 unit sales of 9.95 million. Each of them broke the previous yearly unit sales record set in 2007 by Nintendo DS with sales of 8.52 million. Consequently, Wii represented 55 percent of all next generation home console sales in 2008, while Nintendo DS claimed 72 percent of all portable system sales in 2008.

Apple did try to make its own game console 14 years ago—and it was a major flop. In fact, it has the dubious distinction of being named by GamePro as the worst selling game console of all time.

And where’s what PC World had to say about the Apple game console: “Before Xbox, before PlayStation, before DreamCast, there was Apple’s Pippin. Wha-huh? That’s right—Apple had an Internet-capable game console that connected to your TV. But it ran on a weak PowerPC processor and came with a puny 14.4-kbps modem, so it was stupendously slow offline and online. Then, too, it was based on the Mac OS, so almost no games were available for it. And it cost nearly $600—nearly twice as much as other, far more powerful game consoles. Underpowered, overpriced, and underutilized—that pretty much describes everything that came out of Apple in the mid-90s.”

So I think that Apple will be leery of making another attempt into the market—unless it has something truly revolutionary in mind. Or, unless it has plans to tie such a device into the games being sold for the iPhone and iPod touch. Mac/Life came up with an interesting concept/prototype that does just that: the “GameDock.” You can read about it and see a mock-up here.

I doubt that Apple is working on a GameDock. But it if did, that would be revolutionary, cool and (pun intended) a game changer.

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