The Nintendo Wii was built from cheap off-the-shelf parts, mocked for its name, and outclassed on raw power by every rival, yet it sold more than 101 million units and later found a second life in stroke and Parkinson's rehabilitation clinics. This episode unpacks how Satoru Iwata, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Genyo Takeda abandoned the graphics arms race against the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and pursued a blue ocean strategy aimed at mothers, grandparents, and lapsed players, drawing lessons from the Nintendo DS.

We break down the economics of an overclocked GameCube with an IBM Broadway CPU and ATI Hollywood GPU, the decision to skip DVD playback, and profit on every console from day one, then the 200-million-dollar Wii Would Like to Play campaign, the Wii Sports pack-in, the infrared camera and LED sensor bar trick behind the remote, WiiConnec ...