Release Date	April 25 2008
Format	Wii
Publisher	Nintendo
Developer	Nintendo
Price	£69.99
Distribution	Koch
Contact	08700 270985

Wii Fit

Exercise is a funny thing. Some of us spend our hard earned cash on a gym membership we never use. Parents know their children need lots of it but aren’t sure how to motivate them to do any.

And most of us see it as about as much fun as The Antiques Roadshow. One thing you can guarantee, though, is that most of us know we should be doing more of it.

With Wii Fit, Nintendo has cunningly come up with a new way to help us battle the bulge – while simultaneously changing our preconceptions about gaming and exercising, and promising to sell huge amounts. All this from a game? You’d better believe it.

Nintendo’s huge marketing and PR campaign will have made sure we all know about it already, but here’s a taste of what the game has to offer.

Crucially, Wii Fit offers up a new peripheral – the Wii Balance Board. It promises to once again change the way consumers interact with games, and we’re told there are future software products that will make use of the innovative peripheral. The Balance Board will get family members and gamers alike training in more than 40 activities which fall into four fitness categories; Aerobic Exercise, Muscle Conditioning, Yoga Poses and Balance Games.

The Wii Balance Board uses the whole body to control the game, whether it’s leaning to block footballs, swivelling to power hoop twirls or balancing to hold the perfect yoga pose.

Many would say that half the fun of Brain Training was comparing and ridiculing fellow users on their performance and progress – and it seems Nintendo took those comments to heart with Wii Fit. After breaking a sweat, users can compare their results and progress on a new channel on the Wii Menu.

It hasn’t escaped anyone’s attention that Nintendo is plainly aiming the product at the lucrative mass market. Nintendo’s senior product manager Rob Lowe spells it out: “We are positioning it as the centre of a healthy lifestyle for the whole family, but it can be used by anybody at any level – there's something in it for any age or gender.”

Mass appeal means mass market, and potentially that can span from hardcore gamers to granny, something that Nintendo definitely seems to have got a handle on lately.

With the title’s launch imminent, the marketing and PR campaign has been carefully structured leading up to this point. Lowe explains:

“We have already been communicating Wii Fit to long-lead media since the launch of the Japanese version last year. We have recently been starting to talk to short-lead media, and have had an unprecedented amount of interest and coverage so far. This will hopefully crescendo to the launch.”

Nintendo has notably been making use of celebrities in its advertising campaigns over the past year, and Lowe confirms Wii Fit will be no exception. “We will have celebrity fitness experts endorsing the product on broadcast media.”

PR hasn’t been neglected either. Lowe adds: “We are launching a massive explanatory TV campaign, firstly showing the concept behind the Wii Board, and then going to explain how it tracks your progress over time, and finally showing how different types of people can benefit from the various exercises within the software.

“We are also co-ordinating a huge advertorial campaign explaining Wii Fit within a huge array of lifestyle publications for both men and women. Overall it's the biggest and most groundbreaking Wii campaign we’ve ever done – including the launch of Wii itself.”

With Nintendo seeing the Wii Fit campaign in terms of the all-conquering Wii, the prognosis must be good. You can expect the national media will be giving the peripheral and game plenty of coverage. It would surely be a foolhardy observer that bets against Wii Fit being a huge success. If Nintendo was to write a book about how to produce titles that appeal to the mass market, you can bet Wii Fit would be the latest chapter.