5. Wii Remote
Your humble correspondent was there, in a quietly respectful Japanese press audience at the Tokyo Game Show in 2005, when the late Satoru Iwata pulled a prototype Wii remote out of his jacket pocket. At that stage Nintendo's next console, which was already expected to be technically inferior to the upcoming PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, was known as "Revolution", but nobody really anticipated such a profound departure from what had come before. That scepticism held firm for many months, but once the Wii hit the market it was clear it was something special. Traditional game critics questioned the depth of products like Wii Sports, but the mass market was enraptured by the opportunity to play games through motions and gestures rather than complex button schematics. The rest is history.
6. Wii Balance Board
Nintendo was already changing perceptions of what it meant to be a gamer with the Wii, one of the most successful consoles ever created, but Wii Fit really doubled down on the firm's new audience. A fitness product featuring yoga, strength training and balance mini-games, the game was famous for its Balance Board peripheral, a white plastic slab that measures a player's weight and center of balance. If you think some of Nintendo's decisions in recent years have been met with core gamer derision, you should have seen the original reaction to Wii Fit, but in keeping with the firm's Midas touch at the time, it went on to sell over 20 million copies. With that said, most of those now seem to be available in job lots on eBay...
7. Nintendo DS
When Sony unveiled the PlayStation Portable at E3 in 2003, the consensus was that Sony was coming for the rest of Nintendo's lunch money. The PlayStation brand had already swept to dominance in the home console arena, and now it looked like Sony would displace Nintendo as the default option for portable gameplay. When the two screens of Nintendo DS were first mooted, nobody thought otherwise, but when the games industry got its hands on a prototype at E3 2004, things changed overnight. We were bewitched en masse by this ingenious combination of multiple screens and touch controls, and clever demos quickly showed its potential. Over the years that followed, the DS' versatility and accessibility helped it surpass Game Boy as the pre-eminent portable games brand, and while PSP was a success as well, it was clear Sony would play second fiddle.
8. Brain Age: Train Your Brain In Minutes a Day!
There were plenty of unusual games on Nintendo DS, but Brain Age: Train Your Brain In Minutes a Day (known as Dr Kawashima's Brain Training in PAL territories) was the most successful and iconic. Nominally a puzzle game, Brain Age featured a mixture of quick-play puzzle problems and Sudoku, but its masterstroke was tying them all together in a "brain training" setup that analysed your "brain age" and then sought to help you improve it day by day. Some dismissed it as faddish pseudoscience, but solving its little maths and logic problems every day was an early example of the kind of appointment gaming that has become such a core part of gaming in the years since, and the stories of elderly gamers using Brain Age to keep their senses sharp - while obvious encouraged by Nintendo PR - were true enough in a lot of cases, and that really was something.
