After another successful month, which saw Nintendo selling close to 1.2 million units between their Wii and DS platforms, the company has been touting their own success and making sure everyone knows just how good they’re doing. Two years on and The Wii-as-a-fad arguments seem to have been all but silenced. With consistently strong sales, growing support for third party software sales, and basically unstoppable first party title software sales, the holidays are basically assumed to be busy for the folks in Kyoto. On the heels of this second anniversary, Nintendo of America’s Cammie Dunaway has just outright said the “unique variety of interfaces” available for the system is the key to their success.

It’s hard to deny this, really. The Wii’s basest draw for most people is that first time they see someone winding up for a tennis swing it’s just like they would be in real life (minus the racket and the cool headbands). The “that looks fun and simple” factor really captivated even the most unlikely audiences, if just for a moment, and the price point seemed so right that people were willing to give it a try. The variety of interfaces that have come since have been essentially spear-headed by Nintendo’s first party software, and that’s precisely why they sell so prominently. Wii Sports was the perfect demo for the remote, giving you a fluid range of motion and good representation of real life action. Wii Fit brought the idea of interaction to a totally different level, being almost a spiritual successor to Stadium Events using the NES Power Pad, mixing fitness with actual play through a points system. Nintendo is not trying to reinvent the wheel, but simply change the ways we use it.

The approach Nintendo has taken has almost an arcade feel to it. The same way people would flock to the most oddball arcade games, whether it was riding a skateboard, aiming a firehose, or dodging bullets in Tokyo using real motion, the idea of changing the way a player interacts with the game is what will get them to gather a lasting impression and get others around. While you can look like a fool blindly swinging in the air, most people will turn their heads to see what you are swinging at, which doesn’t carry the same weight as someone plonked on a couch with a controller glued to their hands. In effect, it is this dramatic presentation of a simple concept that has allowed Nintendo to run away with this generation. While high-fidelity is the still a market that won’t go away, it’s not an evolutionary step in how we play games. And while Nintendo may not be the revolution that its original code name seemed to indicate, the success they’ve had and the market they’ve opened to gaming is a revolution that we are going to see long lasting ramifications.

So, when you see Wii Fit in the top ten a year from now, just remember that that experience is not portable, not replaceable and certainly not found in any other system right now. That is the key to the success of Nintendo.