 Picture this, it's the mid-2000s, and you're a developer at Nintendo. You're coming off the GameCube generation, during which you've made incredibly solid work, but the sales figures for your games have been hamstrung by low-console sales. Nintendo's higher-ups have a plan to turn things around, and that plan is motion controls. And you look at this brand new controller designed to resemble a TV remote, and you think to yourself, what am I going to do with this? According to Satoru O'Wata, Nintendo developers at this moment in the company's history were grappling with no small amount of unease. He said, I'm sure that a lot of the development teams involved in continuing series of games had many concerns when the conventional controller design was suddenly reinvented as the Wii remote. While I'm sure that with the right amount of adjustment, the remote can add a new dimension to the gameplay for any game, my initial impression, which I came to quickly, was that there would be games that take to the remote easily, and those that present more of a challenge. There was one development team, though, that were absolutely thrilled by the Wii remote. So excited were they about this new technology, that they volunteered to develop a launch title for the system, even though they were Nintendo's go-to handheld team. This team was, of course, the WarioWare team, and it's no surprise that they were eager to lead the charge on this new hardware. WarioWare games traced their lineage all the way back to Nintendo's earliest, weird attempts at experimenting with technology, and making toys that refused to play by the rules. With WarioWare move it, returning to the idea of waggly motion-controlled micro-games, it's time to explore why WarioWare matters. As we noted in our video last year on the origins of Wario, the original WarioWare game grew out of experimentation on the ill-fated Mario Artist game for the Nintendo 64 disc drive. This may have been the origin of WarioWare, but it was by no means the origin of the culture of creativity among WarioWare developers. Gunpei Yokoi would not live to see the creation of the WarioWare series, but his guiding influence can be seen throughout these games. Initially hired to maintain the manufacturing presses that created Hannah Fuda playing cards, Yokoi's natural interest in toy making caught the eye of Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi. Yokoi was the first Nintendo employee to be given a research and development job relating to toys, and he absolutely knocked it out of the park. Yokoi had a knack for finding unorthodox uses for otherwise ordinary technology. Discovering that running a light electrical current through a human body could cause a light bulb to illuminate, he invented a love tester. While it claimed to measure attraction, it was actually a genius way for young couples to hold hands in public at a time when such things were to boo within Japanese culture. When he learned about a light sensor, Yokoi dreamed up an electronic shooting gallery, long before the concept of amusement arcades even existed. This same technology would later be used to create light gun games for the Nintendo entertainment system. It was from Yokoi that Nintendo got the often repeated mantra of game design, lateral thinking with withered technology. The idea that a new application for existing technology was better than chasing the latest hardware trends. This would later manifest in the Nintendo Wii's motion controls. Yokoi's team, Research and Development 1, were Nintendo's superstars for a time, but they were eventually overshadowed by Research and Development 4, a team led in part by a former R&D1 developer who had been mentored by Yokoi, Shigeru Miyamoto. Hiroshi Yamaguchi's managerial style was unusual for Japanese companies at the time, where most business leaders attempted to foster loyalty by treating their employees well, Yamaguchi deliberately pitted his development teams against each other. Nintendo employees weren't just competing against rival companies, they were at war with other teams within Nintendo. Thus as Miyamoto's team began to sell huge numbers of software titles for Famicom with hits such as Super Mario Brothers, the Game Boy team, R&B1, were tasked with making portable versions of their rivals work. This didn't sit well with the developers, and the Super Mario Land series of Game Boy games eventually pivoted away from merely copying Mario games to creating their own weird twisted alternative take on Nintendo's mascot. More so than Mario at the time, Wario games were driven by radically reinventing gameplay. Even after Gunpei Yokoi's departure from Nintendo and subsequent death in a tragic car accident, his design philosophy remained ingrained in his former team's design philosophy. Developers like Yoshio Sakamoto were taught by Yokoi, and strove to find new ways to utilize unorthodox hardware within Nintendo games. This can be seen in the second WarioWare game for the Game Boy Advance, WarioWare Twisted. While WarioWare Move It might be the most recent WarioWare game to feature motion controls, it is far from the first. Just as the first WarioWare game was started as a side project by developers looking to experiment, WarioWare Twisted began as the work of Rhythm Heaven director Kazuyoshi Azawa. Working alone, he strapped a motion sensor to a Game Boy Advance cartridge, and came up with a series of micro-games that involved physically rotating the gaming handheld to solve puzzles. When Azawa showed off his prototype, one game that made everybody laugh involved a simulated record player, Satoru Awata himself. At this point, the president of Nintendo took a particular shine to this, placing the Game Boy Advance on a swivel chair and spinning it round to change the speed of the record. Said Sakamoto, I'll never forget that time either, because as Iwata-san was spinning that chair round and round, he'd occasionally say, this is ridiculous, with a big grin on his face. WarioWare Twisted released in tandem with the Nintendo DS WarioWare game, Touched, which similarly made use of new technology in unusual ways. While by this point R&D1 had been restructured and merged with another development team, the WarioWare developers continued to jump at every opportunity to experiment and push the boundaries of what Nintendo games could do. At a time when many Nintendo developers were uneasy about changing hardware, Gunpei Yoko's successes were showing the company how to embrace lateral thinking, and they were doing it with Wario, the oddball, experimental anti-hero. Thus, when Sakamoto and his colleagues first heard of the Nintendo Wii and its motion controls, they already knew exactly what to do. It was the same thing they'd been doing for their entire careers. Goro Abe was quietly confident about using the Wii for Wario right from the start. He later said, I noticed that the other teams were looking at the remote and nunchuck and saying things like, how are we going to make the best use of these in their discussions? But we felt the opposite and, to tell the truth, were a lot more optimistic, saying things along the lines of, if you've got one of these remotes, you can pretty much do anything. There was no shortage of ideas for microgames this time around. The team managed to come up with over a thousand potential games and created storyboards for each, before whittling this down to around 200. Thus, while other developers within Nintendo were still trying to wrap their heads around the new control scheme, the WarioWare team led the way in showing just what this new technology could do. WarioWare smooth moves with the fourth best-selling launch title for the Wii in Japan, after Wii Sports, Wii Play, and the Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. Now, as Nintendo favours us with another motion control WarioWare game in the form of WarioWare Move It, it's worth pondering the moral to this story. There's a lot of freedom that comes with marching to the beat of your own drum.