Nintendo Launches the Wii With Midnight Lines and a $249 Price Tag

Nintendo's next home console, the Wii, went on sale in the United States at midnight Sunday morning, with launch events at the Nintendo World Store at Rockefeller Plaza in New York and at retailers from Best Buy to Toys "R" Us across the country. The console launched at $249.99, undercutting both the Xbox 360 and the new PlayStation 3 by a wide margin and making the Wii the cheapest of the three current-generation consoles by several hundred dollars.

The defining feature of the Wii is the controller. The Wii Remote, marketed as a hand-held wand rather than a traditional gamepad, contains an accelerometer and an infrared sensor that lets it track its position in front of a sensor bar that sits on top of the television. The result, in practice, is that swinging the controller swings a tennis racket on screen, rolling it underhand throws a bowling ball, and pointing it at the screen moves a cursor through menus. The launch bundle includes a copy of "Wii Sports," the demo-style collection that uses these mechanics across five sports.

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé and longtime designer Shigeru Miyamoto have spent the past several months publicly framing the Wii as a console aimed at people who do not currently play games — families, older players, lapsed players from the Nintendo 64 era — rather than the hardcore audience that has driven the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 launches. Sony's PlayStation 3, which launched in the United States on Friday at $499 for the 20-gigabyte model and $599 for the 60-gigabyte model, is sold out at most retailers and has been the subject of widely reported scenes of overnight lines and resale-market frenzy.

The Wii launch lineup includes "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess," released simultaneously for the Wii and the GameCube, along with launch titles from EA, Ubisoft and others. Nintendo has shipped the console with backward compatibility for GameCube discs and memory cards, virtual console support for older games downloaded over Wi-Fi, and the Mii avatar system that lets players build a cartoon likeness of themselves to use across games.

For high school seniors and college students heading home for Thanksgiving, the Wii's launch lands at a recognizable time on the calendar — five days before the holiday, with Black Friday immediately after. Retail availability is expected to be tight through the holiday season, with Nintendo telling reporters this week that it expects to sell four million units worldwide before the end of the year.