The Wii is a home video game machine that Nintendo sold, starting in 2006. You connect it to a television and play games on it. Its famous idea was the controller: instead of only pushing buttons with your thumbs, you hold a stick-shaped remote and move your arm, and the machine senses the movement. So to hit a tennis ball you swing, and to bowl you swing your arm down. Because of that, a lot of people who never played games before — parents, grandparents, whole families at a party — played the Wii. That is really why it matters, and why people still talk about it. Grammar note: we almost always say "the Wii", with "the", when we mean the machine in general or the one in your living room — "we still have the Wii downstairs". Without "the" it usually names the system as a product: "Wii sold very well." The name is spelled with a capital W and two small i's, and it is said exactly like the English word "we". Nintendo chose it on purpose: "we" means everybody, and the two letters ii look like two people standing side by side. In Taiwan you will hear people just say the English name. Today the word is a little old-fashioned. Newer machines followed it (the Wii U, then the Switch), and Nintendo stopped making the Wii years ago. If someone mentions it now, there is often a warm feeling of "back then" in the sentence.

Wii（任天堂遊戲主機）