I’m going to ask you to do something you’ve probably not been asked to do before. Close your eyes and think of the Nintendo Wii. What’s the first thing you remember? I’m guessing lots of you are picturing motion controllers — Nintendo’s flailing first attempt to drag sticks full of gyroscopes, accelerometers, and wriststraps we really should have been wearing into the mainstream. Maybe it’s the face of a Mii, those hauntingly cheery digital facsimiles that filled practically every game worth caring about on the console. For others, it’ll just be Wii Sports, and probably the moment you finally got your old nan to try gaming for the first time, before she accidentally put a Wiimote through your TV (again, wear those wriststraps, kids). Other groups might be thinking of possible best-game-ever Super Mario Galaxy, or balance boards, or when Virtual Console was actually good.

But I bet for a great many of you, it’ll be something completely non-visual. Perhaps it's the Mii Channel music. Or the Wii Shop jingle. Maybe it's the Wii Sports theme song.

There’s just something about music written for the Wii, isn’t there? It sounds… wrong. Not written badly, but just like it doesn’t belong on a regular old games console. PlayStation’s always opted for a detached, ambient cool — waves of strings and THX synth blares. Microsoft has broadly avoided music altogether, swapping the original Xbox’s bizarre industrial soundscapes for near-total silence in its later consoles. Nintendo, to my lasting displeasure, has copied the Xbox approach for its most recent machines.

But Wii had the temerity to feel somehow… approachable? And that music meant your console wasn’t some cold bit of hardware; it was a little portal to somewhere warmer, friendlier, and way more interested in jazz than you’d go in expecting. It’s a design choice that I’d argue doesn’t just stick in the memory — at this point, I’d say the Wii’s music is the console’s longest-lasting legacy.

Motion controls, Miis, and balance boards have all been removed or diminished as Nintendo moved on, but take a quick look across YouTube, TikTok, or Twitter, and I guarantee it won’t take all that long to hear a Wii track. Covers and memes featuring music from the Wii are everywhere. Music written for the Wii has taken on a new life as a cultural touchstone, and inspired people far beyond the confines of the little white wedge it was composed for.

Which leads us to a fundamental question: “why?” What is it about this collection of bizarrely optimistic tracks that’s helped them live so far beyond the Wii itself? To help answer that question, I spoke to musicians and comedians that have been unexpectedly inspired by music written for the Wii, and even gone on to make their own iconic work out of it.

Chapter 1: Kazumi Totaka

Music written for the Wii has a singular quality. Tracks might differ in style and instrumentation, but there’s a general feeling about it that makes it all feel whole. From the console’s individual menu channels, to the many, many songs written for pack-in game Wii Sports, you get that odd sense that you could identify a Wii track if you heard it. That’s probably largely down to the fact that one man is responsible for almost all of it.

Even if you’d somehow avoided all of the music written for Wii, you’ve likely heard the work of Kazumi Totaka. Link’s Awakening, Luigi’s Mansion, and the entire Animal Crossing series were all soundtracked by this single composer. (Also, weirdly, he’s the voice of Yoshi.)

After coming up under the tutelage of Koji “I composed the Super Mario Bros. theme tune” Kondo, Totaka established himself as one of Nintendo’s leading in-house composers, someone who can be trusted to add that little bit of unexpected magic to everything he touches. (Plus a bit of expected magic in the form of Totaka’s song, a 19-note melody he hides inside every game he’s involved with). It’s not a huge surprise, then, that it was Totaka who was tasked with giving the Wii its musical identity.

Totaka doesn’t give an awful lot of interviews, so there’s not really a record of how he felt about being asked to compose for a console, rather than a game, but it must have been an odd experience. Where soundtracking games is more a case of accentuating or illustrating an existing vibe, Totaka’s work on the Wii was a little different — suddenly, he was creating music out of nothing to build avatars to, to shop with, or just to look at the weather. But rather than feeling anonymous or diffuse, the musical identity Totaka stamped onto the console was so distinct that it leaked into its games.

Wii Sports is the most obvious example — a game that feels completely part of the Wii package, and lives up to that idea in how its soundtrack sits alongside the console’s menu music in our collective memory. It’s an identity that would eventually lead Totaka to be given the position of game director on Wii Music.

Totaka’s work in making all of these tracks feel so indelible went further than cementing an identity — much of what he wrote has lived far, far longer than the actual Wii channels and games ever did.

Chapter 2: Charles Cornell

YouTuber, jazz pianist, and well-bearded pop musicologist Charles Cornell has previously explained the excellence of the Wii’s many musical themes — and seemed the perfect person to talk about why these tracks seem to endure so much. Chiefly, it seems, it’s all about repetition.

“I think that musically, one of the indications that the job was done so well, is that you almost didn't even notice the music, at least at first,” Cornell told IGN. “It was one of those things where it just became familiar via playing the game. Just by nature of participating and constantly doing it over and over and over again, you realize, ‘Oh, I'm singing along every time I open this menu.’"

It’s no surprise, then, that some of the top results on YouTube for the Mii Channel theme are 10 hour loops, some with over 10 million views. Key to the Mii Channel, the Wii Shop tune, and other Wii big hitters are that they somehow never wear out their welcome. For Cornell, Totaka’s trick seems to be making something that can always sound the same, but feels like it was made differently to what you’d normally hear:

“I don't expect to see music written in the way that I encounter it in the jazz world regularly,” said Cornell. “I think that's one of the biggest things that stuck out to me, compositionally, was just seeing like, ‘Oh, this guy's writing this stuff how we approach a lot of tunes — either tunes that are already written that we play or writing your own tunes with a jazz style — it just has that vocabulary in the writing and the composition.’

“[The Wii music] is just a tune,” he added, likening it to “a chart that somebody might bring to a session and just be like, ‘Oh man, I've been working on this tune, you guys want to play it?’ But when you have a working knowledge, an ear training and an ability to hear musical form and understand where music is going harmonically, and you hear some of the stuff that's going on in the soundtrack… I was like, ‘Whoa, that's cool.’”

But the secret sophistication behind the Wii’s tracks doesn’t just make them good; it makes them, well, funny. And this might be the key to their enduring success – put some Wii music on top of something else, and it get funnier. It’s basically internet science at this point, and a legacy of sketches, video memes, and remixes has followed to prove that hypothesis. But what turns well-written jazz composition into the equivalent of comedy flavouring?

Cornell theorizes the comedy comes from three things: “Number one, it's nostalgia, because a lot of us who are now looking at the memes of this stuff played it when we were younger, right? Number two: the ridiculousness of the Mii Characters — when you create your character and how people have done so much, just stupid, crazy things.

“Then also, I don't think it's as much the composition as it is the instrumentation. So, the usage of specific synthesizers, the usage of these goofier sounds. They weren't trying to create something that sounded real, and I think that the goofiness of something that's not real really comes across, and that's one of the things that makes it feel funny.”

That potent combo of nostalgia and possibly purposeful strangeness has led to innumerable comedy creations featuring Wii music — to the point where I’m sure there are kids who could hum the Wii Shop music, but have never seen the original shop itself. That trend had to start somewhere, and I’m pretty sure I know where.

Chapter 3: Update Day

There’s no simple way of identifying who used the Wii’s music as a comedy tool first, but I think I know who succeeded with it first. Most Wii music memes and covers you’ll know came after the Wii was already in the rearview mirror for gaming as a whole, and many more arrived after it stopped production altogether. But ‘Update Day’ arrived in 2008, amid a tidal wave of Wii fever.

Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol had started a web series, Nirvana the Band the Show, in 2006 and, inspired by the likes of Mega64, blended pop culture, lo-fi sketches, and deep-cut gaming knowledge to make for low-key, surreal, cut-up comedy. They were also extremely into the Wii, and it led directly to the sketch in which Jay surprises (then infuriates) Matt by improvising an entire song set to the Wii Shopping Channel music. Amazingly, it was almost as organic behind the scenes as the sketch makes it look.

“It was hard to do because we were writing it as we went and the whole lyrics were a real spur of the moment sort of thing that was happening so quickly,” McCarrol told IGN. “We were scribbling them down on a paper and Matt was holding them up for me off-screen and he was trying to read them and sing them through — I was barely able to get them out because I was singing it seconds after we wrote it.”

Johnson added: “You were also so drunk, which I know you don't mind being reminded about.” McCarrol, incidentally, vehemently denies the accusation.

It’s no surprise that they honed in on the song’s weird appeal so early. The pair loved video game music, building it into their show from the very beginning, and something about this particular song worked for them immediately.

“It's one of those pieces of music where you don't even get to be exposed to that level of jazzy, complicated chords moving around,” said McCarrol. “It's the same way that the only way people experience classical music now is mostly through movies, and so it's nice that video games still have one foot in the door to just give your ears a taste of something really complex.”

Johnson added that using the music as a premise for comedy “is just easy because it's like this music is meant to signify nothing, this music has meant to just be the thing you listened to when you get onto an elevator or when you're in a shopping mall, and so people have tried to ironically spin it into being like, ‘Oh, it could be really funny if I put this music against anything.’ That may also be what's going on.”

The thing is, Update Day was never meant to stand out so much from the rest of the series. McCarrol and Johnson had always intended for it to feel like a complete show, and it surprised them most of all when that single sketch, and the song it was built around, became an internet phenomenon of its own.

To this day, almost 15 years later, a Twitter account called Wii Shop Wednesday still reposts the sketch on a weekly basis, to almost 40,000 followers. Even after Nirvana The Band The Show became a fully fledged TV series, this potentially obscure section of McCarrol and Johnson’s past is still probably their best-known work.

Update Day didn’t necessarily create the future of how the Wii’s music would be used by the internet, but it definitely predicted it — an early marker of how these strange, quietly brilliant compositions would be copied, warped, and re-used for years to come by an audience that finds them deeply funny, and even touchingly nostalgic. The number of ways they’ve been utilised since then is staggering, but it seems to have taken a step beyond even that in the last few years.

Chapter 4: Gundacker

After more than a decade of comedy created using music written for the Wii, it’s no surprise that, at some point, the trend would eat itself. Comedian Gabriel Gundacker didn’t just use old Wii music — he wrote an entire album of his own new compositions, designed to sound like originals. The only thing is, he never actually meant to.

“I had written a song that I really loved,” Gundacker told IGN. “And then the next day I went back and listened to it and I was like, ‘Okay, this sounds like a Wii song. This sounds like a Wii Sports song.’ And so I just changed a few things about it and I decided to make it into a bit, and then it wasn't until after that one, that I was like, ‘Okay, this is kind of fun. Maybe I should try and make Wii songs.’"

You remember how I spoke about that odd feeling that you’d probably know a song written for the Wii if you heard it? Gundacker — an accomplished musician himself — realised that he could play off of that idea, and began to build an entire series of unofficial Wii Sports tracks, each one providing the soundtrack to a Wii Sport that never existed: snorkeling, curling, or chess in the park. He just needed to learn how Totaka did that in the first place:

“There are definitely rules," said Gundacker. "There are absolutely rules, or there are sounds that you have to use. You have to use accordion, you have to use this beautiful, fake, digital acoustic guitar. Basically what I did is I went and listened to each track. They're very consistent themselves — the sounds they use in Animal Crossing and in Nintendogs and Wii Sports, and then just some of the Wii music in general all come from the same sort of sound bank or whatever that they've decided are feel-good. This isn't Zelda, you're not wielding a sword, we're just having fun. So it's just using those sounds, and the accordion is the main one."

Just like the real thing, Gundacker’s songs ripple with an odd combination of goofiness and gentle loveliness. But, just as Charles Cornell told us earlier, he’s also aiming for some of Kazumi Totaka’s secret sophistication, too:

“Well, I wonder how he approaches that music, because it usually starts and ends with a pretty distinct melody," Gundacker said. "The beginning, everybody can hum it. And then the last thing, you can hum it. And then in the middle, it goes all over the place. I feel like he writes that melody first and then he just starts trying to find the chords that follow it.”

The response to Gundacker’s songs prove that he hit on the right feeling. With each successive new release he was getting the same kinds of responses — people loving the accuracy as much as the silliness of the project. Once he’d written eight tracks, they were released as a full album, which kind of feels like the ultimate end point for the Wii soundtrack’s legacy. It’s now so much its own idea, separate from the console itself, that it’s spawning its own creations. Gundacker sees that happening elsewhere too, with the Hotline Bling-Wii Shop Channel mashup and within the Ariana Grande album Sweetener, for example. "There's a few tracks on that album that Pharrell, whether or not he knows it, he's absolutely pulling from Wii sounds," he said.

If we’re seeing Totaka’s songwriting now influencing not just self-referential internet culture, but wider musical creativity, this is proof of its legacy, right? Where the Wii’s other biggest innovations feel forgotten or improved upon by others, its music is, somehow, stronger and more meaningful than ever.

The Lasting Legacy of Wii’s Music

It might seem absurd to spend this long thinking about music written for the Wii — probably because it is absurd — but just like the music itself, there’s a hidden depth here. The fact that Totaka’s music stands so alone in the industry, especially this long after it was created, speaks not just to the Wii, but to Nintendo itself.

The Wii’s music is pulling in two directions — it might be used for very different reasons by its fans, but it’s absolutely representative of Nintendo’s own stubbornness in standing out from the crowd. Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto has famously repeatedly said he’s not really influenced by other people’s games, because it would affect his own creations. It feels like the same philosophy applied by Totaka, and it makes for a soundtrack that could only sound like it came from a Nintendo console.

Even if you’ve never actually played the thing, even if you’ve only seen it used on videos of children falling over, or covers played almost entirely on bottles, or turned into that last bit from the Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg song, you kind of know who’s behind it.

In a way, it’s not really that the music has outlived the Wii — it’s that this extraordinarily weird, nostalgic music is keeping the memory of this extraordinarily weird, nostalgic little console alive. And that’s a legacy.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter.

Licorice Pizza debuts in theaters on Nov. 26, 2021.

Licorice Pizza kind of warns you in the title that, depending on your taste, there’s a good chance some of what’s being served isn’t going to go down easily. Despite the sunny one-sheets and the era’s authentic, up-tempo needle drops, the film is in alignment with Paul Thomas Anderson’s oeuvre of telling the stories of deeply troubled people. Some of it works, but other parts will likely leave you with a strange aftertaste.

Many aren’t going to agree with me, but the very premise of the “romance” at the heart of this film between 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim) isn’t cute, sweet, or charming. It’s one, wrong and two, extremely dysfunctional for this pair living in the Hollywood-adjacent San Fernando Valley. They meet at Gary’s high school on picture day, when he’s in line and she’s assisting the handsy photog. They’re immediately curious about one another as they banter and flirt, and then Gary pursues. Yet through it all, Anderson lays the groundwork for how these two connect on a maturity level that hasn’t graduated from basic recess yard impulses.

Gary, as played by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper Hoffman, is a successful child actor, who has wielded his limited “fame” with confidence far beyond his years. He’s got a lot of alpha energy for such a sprite, which we see is from having to navigate the egos of aging Hollywood stars and a revolving door of casting agents. It’s in this space that he declares to his younger brother, on the same day as meeting her, that he’s going to marry Alana someday. Again, what might be romantic to some is more than creepy to another.

Alana is the youngest daughter of a restrictive ex-Israeli soldier, spinning her wheels personally and professionally. There’s a seething anger just below the surface of all her interactions, impatient with her lot in life and the straight paths she’s uninterested in taking to achieve her goals of wealth and attention. Gary is the road not taken, the one that she knows she shouldn’t pursue. It’s one she flagrantly does, but puts her toe in, and then takes out, like an unending game of hokey pokey for the entire length of the movie.

As the two aggressively flirt and make one another jealous, Gary envelops Alana into his scattershot existence, first as his adult chaperone on his press tour trip to New York City, and then in a series of opportunistic business ventures in the Valley. Be it ahead of the trend — waterbeds, acting gigs, pinball houses, you name it — when Gary puts his eye on it, he’s immediately successful at it. Their seemingly random ventures (which are all based on the real exploits of former child actor Gary ​​Goetzman) carry Gary, Alana, and a small posse of young enablers across a summer in the Valley running breathlessly from one scheme to the next.

In all the crisscrossing, Anderson does capture the time, 1973, with incredible accuracy. Anderson and co-DP Michael Bauman create a landscape that subsumes the cast and location into that time with almost documentarian precision. Faces are shot au natural and close up so every imperfection is captured, bringing a sense of realism to the fore. All of that helps with the almost fever dream escapades that are presented along the way. From Sean Penn and Tom Waits’ aging Hollywood alpha males setting up impromptu motorcycle jumps on a golf course to a surreal evening with Bradley Cooper’s over-sexed Jon Peter’s buying a waterbed, there’s nothing mundane about what Gary and Alana experience together.

But it all gets to be too much about halfway through. What Anderson doesn’t give us is the inner lives of anyone in the film. Gary and Alana are entirely front-facing people, ruled by their mercurial natures and strange, almost magnetic attraction to one another. They tease and bait one another, hurt and then almost ferally defend one another. While Alana does, at a couple points, vocally question the weirdness of her spending so much time with a boy like Gary, the movie isn’t interested in seeing either of them grow. In fact, Anderson seems most interested in just watching them attract and repel one another ad nauseum as they navigate themselves amongst a never-ending lineup of awful men and agency-less women.

Regardless of where Gary and Alana end up in the movie, the biggest barrier to entry in Licorice Pizza is the inherent wrongness of these two being together because of their ages. You can love the performances of Hoffman and Haim, who are both very good, and enjoy their escapades, even if they go on about 40 minutes too long. But you can also reject the extremely bent moral compass the movie mostly ignores. If the genders were turned, there would be no question of how problematic this premise is. But maybe Anderson, in the end, is really provoking our morals. Maybe the broken, cynical playground that serves as the backdrop to their adventures is the canary in the coalmine for this whole seemingly “romantic” venture. I’d like to believe that’s Anderson's true intention, getting us to really think about how easily we’re persuaded to root for a messed-up dynamic because it’s so skillfully framed like a Hollywood ending. And if he’s not, there’s not enough “no thank you’s” in the world to be given to this slice of life.

The Xbox Virtual Museum features a letter from over twenty years ago detailing the time that Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo.

The letter can be found as part of Microsoft's Xbox Virtual Museum, which the company has launched as part of its 20th-anniversary celebrations for Xbox.

While much of the document is unfortunately covered by a large green text overlay, the letter does give a brief insight into the communication between Xbox's head of hardware at the time Rick Thompson and Nintendo of America's then-executive VP of business affairs, Jacqualee Story.

"Dear Jacqualee, I appreciate you taking the time to try to arraign a meeting with Mr. Takeda and Mr. Yamauchi to discuss a possible strategic partnership between Nintendo and Microsoft on future video game platforms," states Thompson in the letter. "I understand Mr. Takeda's concerns about the possible partnership and will try to [obscured text] the guidelines that he has requested."

While large parts of the rest of the letter are unfortunately missing, it's safe to say that very little materialized from the discussions held between the two companies. Earlier this year, Kevin Bachus, former director of third-party relations at Microsoft delved further into the company's attempts to acquire Nintendo at the time as part of an oral history given on the creation of the original Xbox.

"Steve made us go meet with Nintendo to see if they would consider being acquired," explained Bachus. "They just laughed their asses off. Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went."

Despite what sounds like a rather humiliating initial meeting, it appears as though the two companies met on at least one other occasion. "We actually had Nintendo in our building in January 2000 to work through the details of a joint venture where we gave them all the technical specs of the Xbox," explains former head of business development Bob McBreen as part of the same oral history interview.

"The pitch was their hardware stunk, and compared to Sony PlayStation, it did. So the idea was, 'Listen, you’re much better at the game portions of it with Mario and all that stuff. Why don’t you let us take care of the hardware?' But it didn’t work out."

While Microsoft and Nintendo didn't quite end up in partnership with one another, its safe to say that both companies are doing pretty well for themselves nowadays. For more on Xbox's 20th anniversary celebrations, make sure to check out this article detailing how the Virtual Museum actually contains an exhibit dedicated to you.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Celebrated filmmaker and Studio Ghibli legend Hayao Miyazaki is coming out of retirement to make one last movie.

During an interview with the New York Times, the 80-year-old Japanese filmmaker again confirmed that he will be making one more film – a feature-length project called How Do You Live?

When asked why he was making another movie, Miyazaki replied: “Because I wanted to.”

Miyazaki had originally announced his retirement back in 2013, but later made a short film for the Ghibli Museum titled Earwig and the Witch with his son, Goro Miyazaki. Then, in 2018, Miyazaki announced that he would be coming out of retirement once again.

“[He] needed to create something in order to live, basically,” said Goro about his father’s return to filmmaking.

Although details of his upcoming feature-film are scarce, How Do You Live? will be based on a 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino. Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki described the film as “fantasy on a grand scale”.

The only other detail Suzuki would share is that he sees himself in one of the film’s characters, who is not human.

The 1937 novel How Do You Live? tells the story of 15-year-old Junichi Honda following the death of his father. The young boy, known by his nickname Koperu (after astronomer, Copernicus), goes to live with his uncle, and finds himself living very differently – the book deals with perspective, the structure of society and how Koperu views how he fits in.

The book ends with the narrator asking the question: “How do you live?”

Although How Do You Live? has been in the works since 2018, this latest interview offers more of a statement of intent – it is coming. Quite when remains to be seen. But the studio previously said it hopes the film will be completed in the next three years.

Asked how he would answer the question “How Do You Live?” Miyazaki replied: “I am making this movie because I do not have the answer.”

But will this really be Miyazaki’s final film?

“In the West, we always need to know how things end,” said Suzuki. “At Ghibli, the last scene is often a mystery.”

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Bandai Namco and Dimps have announced that a closed beta for Dragon Ball: The Breakers will run on PC next month. Registration for the event, which will run from December 3 to December 4, is now open in North America, Europe, and Japan.

Across the two days, Bandai Namco will run four different closed beta sessions, the majority of which will take place on December 4. A full list of timings for these sessions is outlined below:

• December 3 from 6:00 pm PT / 9:00 pm ET to 10:00 pm PT / 1:00 am ET
• December 4 from 4:00 am PT / 7:00 am ET to 8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET
• December 4 from 10:00 am PT / 1:00 pm ET to 2:00 pm PT / 5:00 pm ET
• December 4 from 6:00 pm PT / 9:00 pm ET to 10:00 pm PT / 1:00 am ET

Bandai Namco initially revealed its announcement trailer for Dragon Ball: The Breakers last week. Unlike previous Dragon Ball games that pitch different Super Saiyan beings against one another in grueling hand-to-hand combat, the latest game from the publisher is taking a rather different approach to gameplay.

The Breakers is an asymmetrical online multiplayer game where players are either assigned as a Raider (Cell, Buu, or Frieza) or one of seven completely ordinary beings trying to run, hide, and outmaneuver their Raider opponent. As well as possessing the ability to run and flee like headless chickens, the seven survivors in the game will be able to work on customizable skill trees, weapons, and more in order to co-operatively escape from the Raider's grasp before they're blown to smithereens.

As well as announcing the dates for the closed beta, Bandai Namco has also released an eleven-minute video for the game (as seen below) which delves further into the premise of the game and what players can expect upon release. Dragon Ball: The Breakers is currently planned for release on PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC in 2022. The game will also be available to play via Backwards Compatibility on Xbox Series X|S and PS5.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.