‘Wii Sports’ is Nintendo’s All Time Best-Selling Video Game

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 25, 8:00AM EST

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‘Wii Sports’ is Nintendo’s All Time Best-Selling Video Game — © Wii Bowling (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Sam DeLong

The NIntendo game platform is among the most successful in the world. Its only real competition comes from the Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox families. The three platforms are part of an industry which is expected to produce over $300 billion in revenue in 2027.

More than 2.5 billion people play video games across the globe, according to Enterprise Apps Today. In the U.S., nearly 64% of adults are gamers, 38% of them between the ages of 18 and 34. Each of the three major platforms has an army of games and configurations. Among those created for Nintendo, the most successful is Wii Sports.

Nintendo was founded as a company making playing cards in Kyoto, Japan, in 1889. It evolved into various other businesses in the ensuing years, and launched its first gaming console, the Color TV-Game, in 1977. Nintendo of America was established in Redmond, Washington, in 1980, and the following year the company had its first hit with the release of Donkey Kong – which, among other things, introduced the character of Mario to gamers. (Speaking of Mario, here are 45 movies based on video games, ranked from worst to best.)

Wii Sports was released in North America on Nov. 19, 2006. By the end of 2017, it had sold 83 copies worldwide. Wii Sports allows gamers to play five sports online – boxing, bowling, golf, baseball, and tennis. Notably, America’s favorite sport, football, is missing. Perhaps that is because the Madden NFL game series developed by EA Tiburon completely dominates the category. Even without football, though, Wii Sports has been an incredible success.

Click here for the best-selling Nintendo games of all time.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.