Unintentional side affects of advanced product features are typically bad. After months of developing and testing features without a hitch, the product releases and subsequently collides fantastically with human nature and conditioning with strange results. A favorite recent example is Joel’s description of the new 7 World Trade Center elevator system. However, and rarely, that side affect could net one millions of dollars.

My family was lucky enough to pick up a Nintendo Wii a couple weeks ago and have been having a ton of fun with it. It’s a kick watching a 3 and 5 year old learn how to play baseball and box in the living room. I’ll write a couple articles about it but for now I’ll start with the second most important and little discussed feature: (the first being the Wii-mote) the Internet Channel. As expected, it simply allows you to surf the web.

Big deal. We’ve been able to do that for years and really, surfing the web on TV _really_ sucks. Your TV’s resolution is obscures text and balancing a keyboard on your lap with a mouse on the coffee table just doesn’t lend themselves to real productivity or entertainment.

Enter the Wii version of Opera and the Wii-mote.

The Wii has an optional download of a custom Opera browser that works seamlessly with the Wii-mote. Click links by simply pointing at them with the Wii-mote from your couch. It’s as convenient as using a mouse if not more so. Text is still entered via an on-screen virtual keyboard so as long as you can avoid that you’re having a good time.

So now what? You’re surfing the web with the Wii-mote and not typing anything in.

Enter flash games and user generated content.

The Opera browser is fully featured with support for flash, JavaScript, Ajax, etc. and allows you to surf anywhere you like on the Internet. So simply browse to your favorite flash games site and have fun with the thousands of FREE game offerings already out there, from your couch. The only trick is to avoid typing in URLs. I built a little page with a short URL here: http://www.foozel.com/wii.htm that can be typed into via Wii’s virtual keyboard. This page serves as a jump point to a bunch of stand alone games and game aggregators.
 
This is a fantastic and stunning back door to Wii game development that anyone can participate in. All a fledgling game developer needs is a copy of Adobe Flash and they can create and publish games to millions Wii owners, instantaneously.

This is great for the Wii community, but even better for Nintendo as the Wii game catalog now includes Wii & GameCube games, offerings from their Virtual Console, and now tens of thousands of free Internet Flash games. This is likely to be the Wii’s killer app.

Internet Flash games on the Wii may not have been so unintentional by Nintendo, but I bet it’ll have a much bigger impact on Nintendo’s sales than they thought it would.

Now, how do we monetize those Flash games on the Wii?