Summary
A talented engineer has built a robot that can playWii Sports’bowling minigame with the best of them. Anyone who owned a Nintendo Wii back in the day will immediately rememberWii Sports, a collection of minigames that came free with the console at launch and demoed its revolutionary-for-the-time motion controls. Five games were included in the originalWii Sports– tennis, baseball, bowling, golf, and boxing – and they all required the player to swing the Wii’s signature Wiimote controller to mimic the actual sport they were based on.
Even after the Nintendo Wii was discontinued in favor of the Wii U and later the Nintendo Switch, fans still play and look back fondly onWii Sports, as many consider it to be the defining title of the Wii and one of the most influential Nintendo games ever made. Future minigame collections like therecent VR titleHome Sportshave taken influence fromWii Sportsand its party-game feel, even as gamers continue to post videos of themselves trying the original in modern times.
YouTube user Emily the Engineer recently took things a step further by creating a robot that can get a near-perfect score inWii Sports’ bowling minigame. In her latest video, Emily described how bowling was herfavorite activity inWii Sports, and this inspired her to put her engineering skills to work to build a machine that could help her regain her lostWii Sportsbowling score.
Fan-Made Robot Plays A Mean Wii Sports Bowling
Using parts from an old store mannequin and a servo-controlled Wii remote holder, Emily’s creation can aim the ball for a perfectWii Sportsbowling score and swing the remote. It took much trial and error, in addition toreplaying a lot ofWii Sportsfor research purposes, but Emily was eventually able to get her creation good enough at the game to impress her friends at a party she organized to show off the robot’s capabilities.
As Emily herself notes, she isn’t the first person to create a robot that can playWii Sportsbowling to perfection (one particularly dedicated engineer put onetogether using LEGO bricks), and her machine doesn’t quite achieve a perfect strike every time. Still, the fact that there are people willing to put the time and effort into contraptions like this is a testament toWii Sports’ lasting popularity in the years since it, and the console it was shipped with, was a cultural phenomenon.
