I recently posted an article regarding one of my numerous failures in trying to break free from the prison of a common life and become an overnight success in the video game world. The traffic on that article was very telling – no one really knows or cares about Jesse “The Body“ Ventura anymore; at least not in the context of video games. Although it also goes back in 2002, my next tale is quite a bit timelier; as it regards one of the hottest topics in gaming right now.

I invented the Wii.

Not all of what makes the Wii the Wii. Accelerometers: no. Speaker in a controller: no. Genital-related name: no. But back in 2002 I was working with some of the concepts that make the Wii the Wii, namely: Simple and intuitive controls that rely on realistic physical motions, and development methods that allowed such controls to be implemented in existing frameworks quickly and cheaply.

Now when I say I invented the Wii, I am not implying that Shigeru Miyamoto stole my ideas, nor do I believe I was the only one in the world to have similar ideas. In fact we now know that Big N was already playing with this stuff behind closed doors during this time frame. What I am claiming is that I had very similar ideas that were ready for the public play long before the Wii was.

Don’t believe me? Roll the video.


Wait a second, other than him playing Tennis, Boxing, Baseball and Golf, doesn’t that look more like Sony’s EyeToy? Why yes it does, and we’ll discuss its similarities as well; but I am talking concepts here more that technology, and Wii is more popular for the moment so it gets the headline. On with the story:

When you leave your desk at work for the night, do you come back to find items missing or stolen? In 2001 we did. Several co-worker friends and I were finding some items (especially change) missing from our desks. Rather than just report these thefts, one of my more tech-savvy co-workers decided to institute some vigilante justice. He hooked up a web cam to watch his desk and ran it overnight. He downloaded some software that detected motion in certain areas on the screen and took pictures if motion was detected. Sure enough, three days later we have a nice flip-book of pictures of the clean-up guy rummaging through the drawers, jumping when he caught sight of the camera, and then clicking the button to turn the camera off. He didn’t realize there was actually a PC with a hard drive hooked up to it I suppose.

Nothing happened to the thief of course. My friend was warned because apparently his makeshift security system broke some privacy rules. But I digress.

I have no way to explain it, but when we looked at this security software my gamer brain wondered how I could use it to play Punch-Out. Having some basic development skills (enough at least to make simple games and applications), I set out to do just that.

Sony’s EyeToy had not been unveiled yet, but there were a few online games that made use of a webcam at the time. They weren’t really fun though, and their problems were some of the same that plagued EyeToy when it was released. I think the big mistake was they tried to be too complex, and as a result weren’t precise enough.

Let’s say you were going to play a boxing game made for EyeToy or a similarly designed game. When you punch, the software will try to place the position of you arm, calculate the speed it is traveling, and keep watching as your arm is fully extended. It may continue watching as you bring your arm back, and make sure that your fist is moving back down and not punching again. It will place your body from the start and constantly update to see where you are physically placed. If there isn’t much contrast between your shirt color and the wall behind you, or if anything moves behind you, your placement may be confused.

I didn’t set out to directly place punches or calculate fist velocity; because after doing that you would still have to make a fun boxing game using it. I wanted to play Punch-Out.

Rather than trying to constantly keep track of the players position, velocity, different limb movements, etc. I used the simplistic approach of that security software: If motion here then do this. More precisely, every possible action was represented on the webcam display by a dot. Hit (or make motion) on that dot and the action would be triggered. The placement of the dots is what would make the motions intuitive: the punch dots would be placed above your head so punching up (as Little Mac tended to do) would make the character punch. The dodge dots were placed on the left and right bottom so that they would be triggered when the player took a step either direction.

Now that I had the intuitive controls worked out it was time to integrate it into the game.

Ah but there lied the other crux of all other web cam games (and eventually EyeToy). You couldn’t take a game that was already fun (like Punch-Out) and just use your new webcam controls. You had to open up the code and integrate the new controls and webcam display into the game. Your binary or final build had to be compiled with your webcam controls already fully integrated.
Or did they? I was way out of my league to try to make my own Punch-Out, and I was certainly far from being able to hack a Punch-Out ROM to add a PC webcam display. So my solution was this, rather than having the webcam trigger an event in the game, just make it emulate a keypress. Now when I punched up, the webcam pressed A for me.

The possible implications for this were far-reaching. You could place the motion dots wherever you wanted, and make them activate any keyboard, joystick, or mouse event you wanted. Technically, you could play any game on the PC with motion controls using one separate controlling application. Granted, complex controls would be tough to separate on the webcam display, and many games wouldn’t feel natural being mapped to physical movement. But as the “casual game revolution” has shown us, there were plenty of simplistic games out there. There were plenty of games where it would work well enough until some good games were built with it specifically in mind. Bottom line: you could get intuitive motion controls into games for very cheap. And you could guarantee the games would be fun, because you could use the controls on games you already enjoyed playing.

(Hmmm… Perhaps rather than claiming to have invented Wii concepts I should be burned at the stake for inventing Wii-waggle.)

So why have you never heard of this? Perhaps because like Napoleon, I lack skills; namely marketing and social networks skills. Or perhaps just because it didn’t bring the whole package together the way Wii did. Heck, even EyeToy for the world-famous PS2 didn’t have nearly the impact of the Wii. Unlike the first story, there is not one central event that turned this downhill. I just didn’t make the right connections for commercial success, as a result it never capitalized on its potential and never really evolved from the prototypes shown on the video.



Despite the fan-boy baiting title of this article, I do not have delusions that this could have been the runaway success that Wii is. However, based on many of the game releases we see on all systems, I think it’s a fair statement to say you can have a game or program that is complete crap and get it published. Since I am a one-man team. just that would have been enough for me to call it a success. I failed at even that.

Yes, I call my site Fantendo, so naturally I got a Wii and love playing it. As a long-time Nintendo fan, I also really enjoy seeing the success they are having. But as I push pencils and fill out TPS reports in my average-joe life, I take solace in knowing that I have been swinging my virtual tennis racket longer than Shiggy himself.

What do you think? Is there still any value in a program like this in 2007? Do you have ideas on what it could be used for?

Edit: Here are direct video links for those who cannot see them.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YVcwuRNZUzg
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-yJh3Cfrc7g