Features// The Wii House: Welcome to the House of Fun

Somewhere in an unassuming side street in central London there is a house stacked full to the brim with Nintendo Wiis. The house has become known as The Wii House. SPOnG was offered a visit to the hidden location; this is our story…

Nintendo has fully kitted out this palace of pleasure in the style of a typical family home^*, in order for members of Her Majesty’s Gaming Media to finally get their hands on review versions of Wii games in a relaxed, homely environment.

So SPOnG spent a good part of yesterday snooping around The Wii House with our trusty snapper, Stuart, in tow, who took the pictures you can see right here.

It’s both an obvious and a cracking idea. Don’t invite journalists to some soulless office in the middle of a faceless business park to sit in a conference room to play early code on games. Do invite them to a nice warm dream-house in ‘the smoke’ and let them live out their fantasies of Wallpaper magazine-style minimalist urban living while they play Zelda ‘til their dark little hearts are once more full of Nintendo love.

The house consists of a nice big comfy (Zelda) lounge and fully-fitted Wii kitchen on the ground floor and a large minimalist-style apartment on the second floor featuring some very cool Wii-adapted film posters of The Godfather, Vertigo, Deliverance and Blade, as you can see from the pics.

At the top of the house are the typical teenage boy’s and girl's rooms. SPOnG had a good snoop around the whole house, apart from the boy’s room, which was still not available “due to technical difficulties”. We couldn't help but wonder if the fictitious teenage boy in question had trashed his room in a temper tantrum over the fact that his fictitious parents had decided to invite hundreds of journalists to come over to peek under his bed!

The Wii House also helps Nintendo overcome the eternal problem of having very limited debug review Wii units to distribute to mainstream press in order for them to be able to play through early code on games for news, preview and review purposes.

This is in every way a good thing for the most lazy of all animals: the UK’s non-gaming, non-specialist journalists. The habitat of 90% of these creatures is a mere cab ride from the Wii House and their gentlemen’s clubs.

As we hung – shiftily - around outside the house yesterday, we weren’t initially sure if Nintendo’s PR lady had given us the correct address, although the second the doors open it’s quite obvious that we had found our gaming Mecca. Obvious, mainly because of the extensive Wii branding throughout the gaff, which extends through to the kitchen, toilet and bathrooms, as you can see from the pics here!

It is also obvious from the fact that each room is full of gaming journalists, either quietly engrossed in one of the (proper) games on show such as Zelda: The Twilight Princess or Call of Duty 3, or laughing and joking around with colleagues on Wii Sports or Wii Play in one of the “kid’s rooms” upstairs.

^*Note that this is a typical family home, if you are a family of obsessive hardcore gaming, high-paid city brokers on an approximate combined income of around a minimum £10,000 per month.