Wii Speak

~ the obituary ~

The Wii Speak was a small silver bar with a clip on the back and a strip of black mesh across the front, and you were supposed to hang it off the top of your television and forget it was there. Thirty dollars on its own, or sixty nine in a box with Animal Crossing: City Folk, which came out the same day in north america on 16 november 2008. Europe got it on 5 december.

Every other console in 2008 sold you a headset. Nintendo sold you a room. The stated design goal, which came from Miyamoto, was to pick up several people talking at the same time in one living room and carry all of it to another living room somewhere else. There was filtering inside to keep the television's own speakers from feeding back into the microphone, and an LED on the front so you knew whether the thing was listening.

Fourteen games ended up supporting it. Animal Crossing was the one it was built around, and after that the list got thin and slightly odd: Monster Hunter Tri, The Conduit, a run of 2K sports titles, a Jeopardy adaptation. Alongside the hardware came the Wii Speak Channel, free with a sixteen digit ticket in the box, which let you sit on the console's main menu and talk to friends without any game running at all.

A room microphone assumes there is a second room with the same hardware in it. That is the honest reason this was never going to reach me. I was twenty four in 2008 and working, the Wii existed in Turkey but the accessory shelf around it mostly did not, and voice over a home connection was still something you argued with rather than something you used. The whole product depended on a density of Wii owning households that a lot of the world did not have.

~ the case file ~

~ a room, not a headset ~

The decision underneath the Wii Speak is the same decision that made the whole console. A headset is a piece of equipment you put on, and putting it on marks you as someone who is doing this seriously. Nintendo's argument in 2006 had been that this exact gesture was keeping most of the household out of games, so the Wii Speak was built for the person who does not want to be wearing anything.

It worked in the sense that it did what it said. Several voices at once with nothing on your head and nothing to set up. It failed in the sense that shared audio in a shared space needs everyone in both rooms to be up for it, and a group of four is far harder to schedule than one person with a headset at midnight. The thing was well made for a social occasion that mostly does not happen.

~ the channel dies first ~

The Wii Speak Channel got its last update on 27 march 2009, which is early. It ran on WiiConnect24, the background service that also carried the console's message board and its little daily channels, and when Nintendo announced the end of WiiConnect24 the channel went with it on 28 june 2013.

The microphone itself kept working for another eleven months, because in-game voice ran over a separate service. That ended on 20 may 2014 when Nintendo shut the Wii Wi-Fi Connection down entirely. Two shutdowns, both of them announcements about something else, and neither mentioning the accessory by name.

~ what the gamepad inherited ~

By 2010 Nintendo was telling people the Wii Speak would only be stocked at limited retail locations, which is how a product is discontinued without a press release. The Wii U shipped in 2012 with a microphone built into the GamePad, so the accessory had already been absorbed into the controller before the servers behind it were turned off.

What did not get inherited was the idea. The GamePad microphone was for one person holding a screen, and everything since has gone the same way, toward a single account with a single voice attached. The Wii Speak is the one piece of hardware from that era that assumed the unit of a household rather than a login.

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