Wii Sports Bowling Robot Mastered by Talented Engineer

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Summary

  • An engineer built a robot to ace Wii Sports’ bowling minigame, impressing friends.
  • Wii Sports remains an iconic title with lasting popularity, inspiring future minigame collections.

A talented engineer has built a robot that can play Wii Sports’ bowling minigame with the best of them. Anyone who owned a Nintendo Wii back in the day will immediately remember Wii Sports, a collection of minigames that came free with the console at launch and demoed its revolutionary-for-the-time motion controls. Five games were included in the original Wii Sports – tennis, baseball, bowling, golf, and boxing – and they all required the player to swing the Wii’s signature Wiimote controller to mimic the actual sport they were based on.

Even after the Nintendo Wii was discontinued in favor of the Wii U and later the Nintendo Switch, fans still play and look back fondly on Wii Sports, as many consider it to be the defining title of the Wii and one of the most influential Nintendo games ever made. Future minigame collections like the recent VR title Home Sports have taken influence from Wii Sports and its party-game feel, even as gamers continue to post videos of themselves trying the original in modern times.

YouTube user Emily the Engineer recently took things a step further by creating a robot that can get a near-perfect score in Wii Sports’ bowling minigame. In her latest video, Emily described how bowling was her favorite activity in Wii Sports, and this inspired her to put her engineering skills to work to build a machine that could help her regain her lost Wii Sports bowling score.

Fan-Made Robot Plays A Mean Wii Sports Bowling

Using parts from an old store mannequin and a servo-controlled Wii remote holder, Emily’s creation can aim the ball for a perfect Wii Sports bowling score and swing the remote. It took much trial and error, in addition to replaying a lot of Wii Sports for research purposes, but Emily was eventually able to get her creation good enough at the game to impress her friends at a party she organized to show off the robot’s capabilities.

As Emily herself notes, she isn’t the first person to create a robot that can play Wii Sports bowling to perfection (one particularly dedicated engineer put one together using LEGO bricks), and her machine doesn’t quite achieve a perfect strike every time. Still, the fact that there are people willing to put the time and effort into contraptions like this is a testament to Wii Sports’ lasting popularity in the years since it, and the console it was shipped with, was a cultural phenomenon.

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2025-03-17 21:28