Saturday Night Wii: An Excerpt from Mike Drucker’s Good Game, No Rematch

By Mike Drucker | April 1, 2025 | 10:00am

Photo by Mindy Tucker

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Saturday Night Wii: An Excerpt from Mike Drucker’s Good Game, No Rematch

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If you closely follow the world of comedy you might be familiar with Mike Drucker, a comedian and Emmy-nominated writer for shows like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and Bill Nye Saves the World. If you closely follow the world of videogames, you might also be familiar with Mike Drucker; he was a writer for Nintendo, where he coined the name of the Mario Party 9 minigame “Pizza Me, Mario.” And no matter who you are you might best know Drucker from his social media accounts. He’s got 200,000 followers on Twitter and almost 90,000 on BlueSky, and he posts consistently great stuff about games, comedy, politics, and pop culture in general. Today he makes the jump into books with the publication of Good Game, No Rematch, which is part memoir and part games history—or, as publisher Hanover Square Press describes it in a press release, “a love letter to video games and the people who play them, from a delightfully nerdy voice in the world of comedy.”

Drucker digs into a number of classic games throughout Good Game, No Rematch, including NBA Jam, Dungeons & Dragons, Mortal Kombat, and a few of his beloved Nintendo classics, like Mario and Zelda. In this excerpt, he writes about those heady days of late 2006, when the Nintendo Wii became an instant mainstream phenomenon popular with all ages and walks of life, as Drucker was interning at Saturday Night Live. Read on to see how the Wii fared backstage at SNL, and look for copies of Good Game, No Rematch wherever you get your books, available today.

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Mike Drucker, Good Game No Rematch

I interned at SNL in the early 2000s, when the Nintendo Wii came out. This was also around the same time that Nintendo revamped its Pokémon Center near Rockefeller Center into a full-on company flagship store. I spent hours in that store. When I got stressed or was too early to work or nothing was happening, I’d walk over there, listen to the blissful Nintendo music playing over the speakers, and wish I had a job that let me afford everything. I started going every day when they were first showing off the Wii. The Wii.

It’s easy to forget just how big the Nintendo Wii console was. Everyone remembers it was popular, everyone remembers it sold pretty well. No. It was a fucking tsunami wave. News anchors breathlessly covered the stunning new technology that was wildly swinging your wrist to hit a ball on-screen. Lines to buy the machine twisted around city blocks. Footage from retirement homes showed residents excitedly playing sports around a television screen.

It ultimately sold over 100 million units. That’s not as crazy today—and it’s still not more than the Nintendo Switch or the current all-time-seller, the PlayStation 2—but was a fucking rocket ship. Hell, Nintendo’s previous console, the GameCube, sold about one-fifth of what the Wii sold. Its sequel console, the Wii U, maybe sold a tenth. For a brief moment in gaming history, the Nintendo Wii was all anyone could think about.

Here’s how much people wanted the Nintendo Wii. A radio station in California held an unofficial contest in which participants were asked to drink copious amounts of water without using the bathroom (“Hold Your Wee for a Wii,” they called it). The person who could last the longest won a Nintendo Wii. A woman died during this contest, and her family later sued the radio station. People were literally dying to get a Nintendo Wii for themselves and their families. That’s not a healthy society!

I’ve been to the New York City Nintendo store about twice as much as I’ve ever been to any gym, but I have never seen crowds like I did when they were first demoing Wii Sports.

I saw an adult cry while playing. There is a man somewhere who definitely remembers holding that Wii remote in his hand. This was his ultimate experience. There would be nothing greater than this. Even the birth of his children would pale in comparison. He wept like Alexander the Great when he realized there were no more worlds to conquer.

Of course, when the Nintendo Wii was released, Saturday Night Live also got one. The biggest benefit to being a hugely famous television show is that companies will send you extremely expensive things for free, even though you can afford it more than anyone else. But this delivery was heavily anticipated. The Wii had been so hyped that even adults who’d never played a video game in their life were fascinated. The box was carried into the office like someone was carrying the blessed bones of a legendary saint. In retrospect, the Wii feels like a system that was crushed under a glut of late-stage shovelware and decent, albeit incomplete, ideas. But then? It was like we were about to rub a magic lamp.

It might also be worth mentioning that during my time at SNL, I kind of always wore the same red Nintendo sweatshirt. I wouldn’t say every day I was there, but I would say too many of the days I was there. I’ve never been completely comfortable with my body, and nothing cures that feeling of awkwardness like an oversize, Santa-Claus-ass-looking sweatshirt with a video game logo. So people rightfully assumed I was into video games. The writers for Weekend Update nicknamed me “Nintendo Boy.” This also meant people assumed I’d help set up the new console and show everyone how it worked.

To be clear, I absolutely would. To quote Dr. Zoidberg, “Hooray, I’m useful! I’m having a wonderful time!” I’d spent two decades fantasizing that one day famous people would say, “Hey, do you want to show me a video game?” In the second Jurassic Park movie, they show this one character being good at gymnastics at the beginning of the movie, and then later on she uses it to defeat velociraptors. This was my gymnastics. Which, I guess, would make putting wires into a television my velociraptor.

Along with an IT guy and a producer who I’m still friends with to this day (shout-out to John MacDonald), I hooked up the Wii and a crowd gathered in the long, narrow hallway. Celebrities from television and movies dropped what they were doing to watch digital bowling. It was like that scene in The Matrix in which the little hacker guy grabs everyone because Morpheus is about to fight Neo. Same energy. Running down the hall, banging on doors. “Get out here! They’ve got Wii Tennis going!”

After showing everyone how it worked, I slowly slipped to the back of the crowd and let the grown-ups take over. To be clear, nobody pushed me back. The cast and writers were always nice to me, a sweet but anxious man-child. But I did know my place. I was setting up the system for the cast and writers, but I was neither cast nor writer. The barrier between useful and annoyingly eager is a thin one that I’ve crossed many times in my life. But not that day, Satan.

So for a while, I watched some of the best improvisers and stand-ups and writers and actors in the world play Wii Sports, swinging their arms wildly to bowl or slam a tennis ball. A writer (I forget who, but imagine it’s your favorite one) tried to play baseball and almost threw the remote through a wall, so we stuck to tennis and bowling, and I started to be more adamant about using that wrist strap. There’s something funny about telling extremely rich and powerful people to please, please keep the plastic toy connected to their hand.

Then I was asked to play. One of the cast members—I believe Jason Sudeikis, but I could be wrong and I’m sorry if so—said I should get a turn because I set it up. They could’ve let me just sit back and watch like I was an approving father, gently nodding my head whenever someone scored. Instead, they invited me up to play. I felt special. I felt seen. I felt powerful.

I didn’t go easy.

True, I was just an intern, the lowest on the ladder of the show. But I also wanted to show off. I needed everyone to see my skills and look at me with awe and respect. The fact that this didn’t pan out when I tried to impress various crushes in elementary, middle, and high school slipped out of my mind like dry rice in a colander. All I knew was that if I focused and did well, they would think I was a god. And then I guess they’d hire me on the spot? No flaws in the logic there!

Whoever my opponent was got obliterated. I don’t even know who it was, and if I did, I wouldn’t say, because I crushed them so hard that any mention of their name would damage any potential future working relationships. I didn’t even make it fun. I simply won shot after shot. Completely unfair considering they’d never touched a Wii Remote before and I’d been slipping out to go to the Nintendo store to wait in line and play. I annihilated that fucking wimp (please hire me someday if this is you) and did a whoop that probably made the whole building cringe in secondhand embarrassment.

“Now, that’s how you do it!” I said. There were polite head nods and murmurs of “Congrats” as we handed over our controllers to the next people in line. My heart was still racing from a combination of excitement and being grotesquely out of shape, and I knew that I’d impressed them. As far as this sort of thing can impress an actor who’s probably had sex with more people than just their hand.

After the game, the writers’ assistant walked up to me with a cheerful “Hey, man!” I looked up to that dude, so I was ready for a pat on the head. I smiled widely. I asked him if he liked what he saw, which had to be confusing to him because he didn’t. He wasn’t there to talk about the Nintendo Wii. I asked him why he’d called for me, then. He handed me a list of a dozen orders.

“You got a coffee run.”