A sculpture on display at a yearly LEGO building collection in Texas is invoking an acutely nostalgic image for owners of the Nintendo Wii. A LEGO sculpture made by Ian Summers, on display at the 10th annual Brick Rodeo which is currently being held in Houston, depicts a fear had by all owners of the Wii – a remote impaling a poor, unsuspecting television screen.
Summers’ sculpture faithfully recreates the iconic look of the Wii console and remote, as well as a convincing TV monitor, complete with shards of broken glass in the form of small, clear LEGO pieces. The simple and elegant design of the almost universally-recognizable Wii remote is captured precisely in the sculpture, with a clear A button, a small blue light in the 1 position to indicate the remote is on, and even a wrist strap – which was most likely not being worn as it flew into the monitor screen.
A warning to wear the strap was present at the beginning of all Nintendo Wii titles, and the phenomenon of players ignoring it and smashing their TVs after losing their grip on the remote was iconic to the mid to late 2000s, when the Wii was at the top of the gaming world and had cornered the casual gaming market. With an unprecedented amount of scarcity following its launch, the motion-controlled Wii was a hit with families and people who did not usually play video games due to simple and accessible mechanics such as swinging a tennis racket in Wii Sports, and videos of wild swinging motions followed by senseless TV screen destruction were all over the internet and TV.
Despite the fact that plenty of people were flat-out ignoring the wrist strap warning during the console’s heyday, not all incidents of TV smashing happened because of this. The string that connected the early Wii remotes to their straps was particularly thin, and letting go after a hard swing was sometimes enough to break the string altogether, turning the remote into a projectile. Nintendo faced plenty of Wii-related lawsuits, including one from Green Welling LLP, a San Fransisco-based law firm who sued Nintendo over these potentially faulty strings in 2006. Nintendo then had to spend millions in order to replace these straps with more durable ones, and eventually designed a third strap for all future units that featured a lock on the band that adjusted the strap’s tightness.
Even though was the launch of the Nintendo Wii was almost 15 years ago, the memory of its remotes’ destructive power lives on, and anyone who was there to experience the Wii craze will get a kick out of Summers’ tragically beautiful mid-2000s period piece.
Source: Nintendo Life