Who introduced motion controls then? Because you could go as far back as the Nintendo Glove.
It actually goes back significantly further than that, though. And the
'Power Glove' was a 3rd party peripheral only licenced for use on the NES; Nintendo had no input into its design, manufacture, or release. Plus, it was an absolute bag of shite by all accounts!
The first motion controller introduced to home videogaming would seemingly be Datasoft's 'Le Stick' for the Atari 2600, which was full of mercury switches rather than accelerometers, and was apparently also quite rubbish in practice. But you still gotta give it due props because it was born in 1981, so it's older than me and - I'd imagine - most of us reading this thread.
<![CDATA[<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/-D2DIvFSoRw" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/-D2DIvFSoRw</a>]]>The first properly undeniably cool and effective use of motion controls with videogames would likely either be in SEGA's swivelling
Heavyweight Champ arcade cabinet with its totally weird and unique boxing glove controllers (the original unit is from 1976!) - which paved the way for their pressure-sensitive carnival punchbag-controlled fighting cabinets - or their legendary mid-'80s full-body-experience stuff like
Hang On by the immortal genius Yu Suzuki (
Space Harrier, Out Run, After Burner, Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop, Shenmue...), setting the stage for that awesome run of revolutionary motion-controlled hydraulic cabinets SEGA bestowed upon our arcades in their prime.
There were actually numerous novel motion-sensor peripherals that other (contemporarily) major videogame hardware companies like SEGA - as well as, of course, yer peculiar opportunist 3rd party developers - produced themselves and tested out on the home videogaming market, as SP mentioned there, it's just that the Wii was defo the only one which massively caught on (finally). Good job really, as Nintendo more or less put their whole house on it. The story of games hardware manufacturers is one of risks that paid off handsomely for some, and risks that all but buried others, not so much succeeding 'cause you're the best and failing 'cause you're crap.
Again, Nintendo have been around for a mighty long time, so have been involved in a lot of budding trends, but they aren't at the vanguard of everything strange and brilliant in videogame history. They'll be one of the last to embrace proper VR/AR headsets for one, probably because they're wary of making a huge commercial misstep - if they really were these eternally ballsy innovators of the industry, they would've headed the pack on that, because it's an exciting new platform that opens up a vast wealth of pure gameplay possibilities. They're just sort of quietly watching how it all unfolds before playing their hand, which is probably as sensible as Sony was in observing how the Wii fared before doing something similar.
