Shigeru Miyamoto Had One Big Problem With The 'Wii Sports' Release

A new book by former president of Nintendo Of America, Reggie Fils-Aimé, has just dropped and inside have been a number of shocking reveals about the workings of the company. 

His tome titled Disrupting The Game has revealed some revelations about what has been going on at Nintendo behind the scenes. One of the more surprising stories surrounded the launch of the Nintendo Wii, and the disagreements Fils-Aimé had with legendary game developer of the Mario and The Legend Of Zelda franchises, Shigeru Miyamoto. 

You can catch an overview of the Wii Sports successor, Switch Sports, in the video below.

In the book, Fils-Aimé describes how he really pushed to have Wii Sports distributed with the Wii console as a bundle. The idea behind this is to show people how to use the console by giving an easy and fun experience to play straight out of the box. However, he faced opposition from Satoru Iwata, the then CEO of Nintendo, and in particular Miyamoto.

Miyamoto was strongly against the idea of giving away a game which developers had worked so hard on. A lot of work had gone into developing Wii Sports in Japan which Miyamoto had seen. He drew the line for Fils-Aimé reportedly saying "we [Nintendo] don't give away our software."

Fils-Aimé eventually won the battle, at least for the majority of the world. The Wii was eventually sold at launch with Wii Sports included, in every country except Japan and neighbouring South Korea. While Iwata and Miyamoto shared their reservations about the idea of a pack-in title, history has revealed that Fils-Aimé was right.

The Wii went on to be the best-selling home console for Nintendo, though it has since been overtaken by the Switch. The top four best-selling games for the Wii were all pack-in games with Wii Sports leading the bunch. The game sold over 80 million copies in its lifetime and more than doubled the sales of the next best-selling game Mario Kart Wii.