Madden guys at work were all Wii Sports today.

By Stephen Munn | January 2, 2007

At work today, the guys who usually talk to me about Madden and occasionally Resident Evil were all about the Wii Sports bowling, boxing and baseball. Two of those who work with me picked up Wiis this year for young relatives, and apparently then spent a surprising amount of time playing it themselves. I was surprised to hear an eager coworker ask what my rank was in Bowling, and I had no idea there were ranks in Bowling, because I have Zelda.

Needless to say, their scores in Bowling are a lot higher than mine.

The remarkable thing is that the Wii seems to be doing a surprising job of grabbing hold of the more casual gamer than I expected. As a fan of many things Nintendo I have had no problem giving Nintendo my attention, but chatter of things in the Gamecube area didn’t really interest these guys at all, one of whom was only a PS2 owner and the other mainly played on an Xbox. So to me, this is pretty significant. The PS2 owner told me he’s going to get a Wii for himself as soon as he can find one. Can’t be bogarting the kids’ systems. As his nephew put it, “I don’t want my dad touching my Wii.”

What does all this mean to someone like me? I thought about this a lot and the main impact it’s likely to have is that there will be a lot more third party games on Wii than Gamecube (which is not much of an accomplishment, no way to go but up) and the prices of games will drop much faster. So it’s all good news to me.