People Make Games
patreon
The Queen's Golden Wii hits one million views!
🕑 Added 2020-05-08 18:35:33 +0000 UTCHello everyone,
If you’ll forgive a little self-indulgence, we’d like to celebrate our first video reaching a whopping one million views on YouTube. Published over a year ago now, it is of course… What happened to the Queen’s Golden Wii?
If you haven’t seen it before now, the video tells the story of a PR stunt from 2009 in which games publisher THQ sent a gold-plated Nintendo Wii to the actual Queen of England, hoping to attract a few extra headlines for its upcoming title, Big Family Games. Those headlines were certainly written (what games journalist could resist such an opportunity?), but it turns out the Golden Wii never actually made its way to Queen Elizabeth II. Why not? And where is it now? That’s what we set out to uncover.
In the end, we needed to travel to the Netherlands (marking our first ever international PMG story) to visit a man called Donnie, who very graciously invited us into his home to see the fabled console for ourselves.
Interestingly, I remember feeling a little disappointed after we’d seen the Wii for ourselves, wondering if anyone would even care about a console that’d been created to promote a game that almost nobody actually remembers. But in the end, we realised it was more about the journey itself than the destination. I mean that quite literally, I suppose. We made our own hunt for the Golden Wii (and even the travelling we'd need to do) a major part of how we told the story. That’s what makes it work so well in the end, I think.
In fact, my favourite part of the whole video is probably the trip from our flat in Brighton to Donnie’s front door, in which we don’t actually say where we’re going until almost the very end. It’s really fun! How is that so much fun?!
Oh and of course, there’s the letters I sent to the Queen myself. To demonstrate how the Golden Wii would have been mailed to Buckingham Palace, we decided to send Her Majesty a copy of the first series of Gavin & Stacey (we got a great deal from CEX). Unfortunately we managed to then lose the footage of us posting the gift and so had to film a second take in which we sent her the second series as a follow-up. Professional, as always.
Incredibly, we actually received a letter from one of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting, thanking us for our letters and the DVDs we “so kindly sent for Christmas”. You can see a video of us receiving this royal correspondence here. I still can’t quite believe it.
The dog tore a hole in that jumper not long after we recorded this. I'll never forgive her for that. It was a lovely mustard yellow, look at it. Actually, perhaps it's more of an ochre? Horrible dog.
Anyway! One million views. Phwoar. Thanks for being one of them!
