Honestly, I don't think they're particularly innovative. Plenty of people had been working with accelerometers before Nintendo put them in a Wii controller. I h

Honestly, I don't think they're particularly innovative. Plenty of people had been working with accelerometers before Nintendo put them in a Wii controller. I had some circuit boards on my desk at work. The difference seems to be that the executive team is less risk adverse than you would imagine a 100+ year old family owned business to be. If anything, I figure that Nintendo's brand stable allows them to take on bigger hardware risks than others. Sony and Microsoft both have motion control technology, but Nintendo was the only one to ship it to customers by default. Third party publishers were absolutely not on board with that -- they more or less treat consoles as underpowered PCs-- leaving Nintendo more or less standing alone. I don't think Wii ever really had top tier 3rd party support, because they're focus is on publishing a consistent experience across a variety of device types (well, that and Sony / MS using their capital to buy up IP). tl;dr: Nintendo engineers are just as creative as anyone else's, but their management team is comfortable encouraging and placing large bets on them.