Starlight Spotlight: A Hospital Wii in a New Light

In the early 1990s, the world found itself at a crossroads of technological change. Electronic entertainment was blowing up just about everywhere, with Nintendo at the forefront of the home video game markets with their Super Nintendo Entertainment System console and Game Boy handheld. But if you were forced into an extended stay at the hospital, you might not have access to any of it. Due to a wave of concerns surrounding electromagnetic interference (EMI) from electronics, many consumer devices were banned from hospitals. If you were lucky enough to have a cell phone at the time, you'd have to go outside of the hospital to make calls. In 1992, the Starlight Children's Foundation partnered with Nintendo to bring video games into hospitals in a way that complied with stringent hospital regulations. Instead of subjecting children to magazines, books, and daytime television (if they were lucky), the foundation wanted to bring premiere entertainment right into their rooms by creating a hospital approved all-in-one media and gaming station. Their belief was that giving kids a well-needed break from the hardships of treatment, injury, and illness would promote recovery. This partnership proved to be a valuable one, and is still going to this day. As of the writing of this article, this partnership has provided over 8,000 gaming stations to children in hospitals, serving over 15 million gaming sessions to patients in need. From the Super Nintendo all the way to the Nintendo Switch, every Nintendo home console has been housed in a Starlight kiosk at some point! Each of these kiosks were designed to house an off-the-shelf retail console. Except one. Every single kiosk could use standard controllers and play retail games. Except one. In this article, we'd like to talk about the weird and wonderful Starlight Wii.