Nintendo's Miis Have Evolved From The Famicom Disk System To The Switch.

Ah, the Mii. We remember when we first made our own Miis back in 2006. Back then the most character customisation we had experienced was probably with The Sims, so making Miis of our friends, family and favourite video game characters was a fun pastime. It's a real shame, then, that Nintendo stepped away from their Miis, presumably in an attempt to distance Switch from the Wii branding. These fun avatars are still around, of course — the Switch has its own Mii Maker hidden away — but it's not as pronounced and they have certainly taken a back seat in recent years.

With that said, the launch of Miitopia on Switch this Friday sees Miis return in full force with its own enhanced Mii Maker utility, so we thought it would be fun to take a look back at the history of the Miis — what led to their development, their popularity and their eventual side-lining.

The idea of making your own custom characters for video games was one that Nintendo had been brewing in their offices since as early as the NES days. Back on the Famicom Disk System, Shigeru Miyamoto thought it would be fun if players could use the console to create their own custom faces for characters that you could then control after inserting a separate ‘scenario disk’. As outlined by the man himself in a 2007 GDC keynote that charted the evolution of the Mii, a prototype was even developed but when Miyamoto presented his idea to the other higher-ups at Nintendo, they truly struggled to see how this could be turned into a fun game, and so the idea was shelved.

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