How the Wii remote's speaker may change the way we listen to games.

The big secret feature of the Wii controller, eagerly anticipated for months ahead of E3 2006, was in fact quite small. The Wii Remote's built-in speaker left most of us scratching our heads. Nintendo gave only a brief mention about the feature at their press conference, and there was no practical demonstration either in the Kodak Theater or on the E3 show floor. Only a couple of first-party game demos were using the feature at all, but even these couldn't be heard very well due to the overwhelming noise of the expo. Developers we spoke to were unsure of how the feature would be used. Although we believe Nintendo told developers about the speaker before E3, it wasn't supported in development kits until just before the show or possibly afterwards. In short, the speaker remains almost as much a mystery as it was before E3, and Wii is set to launch only a few months from now. I'd like to discuss the potential of this feature and speculate on some of its future applications.