They Made The Wii Bowling Ball, And They're Not Done Yet
By Dr. Eleanor Vance | Published on January 01, 0001
I sat in a blue room on Monday, surrounded by what some hardcore gamers might call artifacts of absurdity. On walls around me hung a Wii bowling ball controller attachment, a Wii pool cue, Wii pom poms, and more.(new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c&cid=872d12ce-453b-4870-845f-955919887e1b'; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c" }).render("79703296e5134c75a2db6e1b64762017"); }); Who makes this stuff? Two amiable Orthodox Jewish brothers — black pants, white shirts, beards, and an offer to their guest of some kosher pastries — sat across from me, cheerful about what they’ve built and the amazing gizmos surrounding us. I was at the second floor offices of CTA Digital, a block from where Brooklyn, New York touches the East River, in a short, aged office building, up an elevator painted with an old yellow floor ad for Domino sugar. I was in the spotless show room where Leo and Sol Markowitz’s line of sometimes-ridiculous, sometimes-useful — and apparently hot-selling — attachments for the Wii and other electronics line the walls. (See their offerings online, then imagine that a lot of that is hanging on the walls of one room that’s also big enough for a couple of couches and a big-screen TV.) The brothers Markowitz are some of the guys who saw in the Wii not just a gamer revolution but a chance to make money selling people things to attach to their Wii remote. And 200,000 units of their Wii bowling ball controller sold worldwide later, they say, they were pleased to be surrounded by the plastic products of that opportunity. “We smelled it right away,” Leo told me, recalling his first sensations of the Wii’s imminent success. The Wii peripheral market is big and, despite other industry slumps, growing. Of the 58.4 million gaming peripherals sold so far this year in the United States, the NPD group reports that 18.4 million of those are for the Wii. That’s up a million from the same date last year. So even though Sol, an avowed Kotaku reader, playfully cut his brother off early in our meeting about Wii add-ons to remind him that [[link]] “real gamers don’t like the Wii,” enough people do like these attachments. They like the tennis rackets and the baseball bats, the imitation light sabers and shotguns. Maybe not the pom-poms — a weak seller — but people like buying Wii peripherals and business is no joke at all. It’s good. CTA has more than 30 employees, a warehouse in upstate New York and design and development teams in Asia. Maybe most importantly, Leo noted, “We have five people who think of things to make 24-7.” They think of things like… the bowling ball. “Why wouldn’t you buy it?” Leo said to me, when I ask him what the point is. I argued that people had been Wii-bowling with no ball-shaped shell around their controller just fine. It makes the game fun for plenty of people, Sol said. “It makes it more exciting.” He knows that “real gamers” won’t care as much. This bowling ball was a dream project, a year in the making and spurred by research that showed them that Wii Sports bowling is the most popular activity on Nintendo’s console. “We all knew that whoever comes out with bowling, it’s going to be huge,” Leo recalled. Those CTA engineers got to work, trying to craft a bowling ball something-or-other that could fit around a Wii Remote. They didn’t want people to chuck a bowling ball controller through their TV, so they tried to design a bowling ball shell that wouldn’t function if you didn’t wear the shell’s wrist strap. Couldn’t get it to work right, Sol said. They settled on a design that has two wrist straps and is sealed with a sticker that must be broken in order to first encase a Wii remote in it. You rip that, you assume the risks. The bowling ball’s good, though it’s holes are positioned only for right-handed bowlers. An ambidextrous design hadn’t worked. But have no fear, fellow southpaws. “We probably will get into the left-handed business,” Leo told me. I
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