Cursed Miis became our utopia

As with many families, a generation gap divides mine between gamers and non-gamers. When my decidedly non-gamer dad spent hours creating Mii characters with gaping black holes for eyes before releasing them Wii Sports Resort table tennis, I knew Nintendo’s Wii and its customizable avatars were something special.

The spirit of the Wii was simple. Young, old, cis, queer, mud, noob – anyone can grab a remote and have fun. And everything about the original Mii characters, right down to their names, encouraged users to do so customize their avatars as funny self caricatures. As a result, chipper facsimiles flourished in my family’s personal Mii Channel, from the ruby ​​lipstick painted on my mother’s Mii (aptly named “Mom”) to the exaggerated eyebrows of mine (named “Aleen”). ‘). Then met in 2010 with Wii Sports Resort‘s CPU Mii Takashi introduced us to a different take on fun.

With a gaudy blue shirt, beady eyes, and lips undergoing mitosis, Takashi was what I can only describe as “cursed.” When he attacked our Miis Wii Sports Resort‘s Swordplay Showdown with its fishy face, we could barely wave our remotes because of our uncontrollable laughter. So thiswe learned, was what Mii Customization was capable of – endless production of the hideous, horrific and hilarious.

In the early to mid-2010s, the Mii Channel, with countless options for noses, eyebrows, eyes, and other customizable body parts, evolved into an intergenerational activity during our family gatherings. At Grandma’s house, the kids gathered around a TV and discussed features with our uncles. We’d get a chuckle from a cousin if we teased her tall stature with the longest length possible, and an amused look from an aunt as her husband twirled and moved her Mii eyebrows to resemble antennae (no reason, just vibes). After sessions after sessions of cursed Mii designing, we stormed games like Wii Sports Resortdecimate the ping pong champion using a Burger Mii and slam the CPU Mii Ryan featuring a Mii character with a bowling ball face. Although our cursed Mii construct has since largely faded from memory, our Miis still lurk in our Mii Channel to this day, waddling around with their unholy expressions and noseless faces. Confession: I still find them funny.

Cursed Mii aesthetics weren’t exclusive to my household at the time. Indeed, its chaotic potential and raging popularity led to a Mii of the Month feature in the now-defunct Nintendo Power magazine. These outlandish designs, also circulated on online forums, inspired users like Chris Elson to invent their own horrors. During his elementary school years, Elson says, customizing Mii characters became a multiplayer game with his brother, each competing to create the “ugliest” avatar on the DS Mii Maker.

“The key was to make your Mii look as inhuman as possible,” says Elson, now a student in Chicago. “I remember trying to make my brother laugh with a Mii turtle. I let his eyes hang from his cheeks.

Image: Nintendo

Image: Nintendo

Other assemblages included removing a beauty mark slightly from the forehead to resemble a fly, replacing nostrils with eyes, and turn a Mii’s face completely upside down – a choice that modern customizable games like The Sims didn’t offer. Although Elson is no longer tinkering with Mii Maker, he fondly looks back on his selection of Mii characters as “ugly but creative things that gave us a good laugh.”

And while Nintendo has left the Wii behind at this point, Mii characters live on.

For Alice, a Mii researcher and modder known online as @HEYimHeroic, the cursed Mii aesthetic remains a highlight of their everyday gaming experience. “The higher the value I enter in Mii Studio, the lower it appears at first glance,” they say of a Mii they show Polygon. “That’s how I got the nose there.”

Part of the cursed Mii’s appeal, they say, stems from an inherent freedom that even Nintendo developers exploited during the early stages of Wii U development. For example, they discovered Michael Tutori, an unused, always-grinning CPU by Wii musicas well as eclectic, unused Mii characters in ‘family_post’, a debugging folder for Wii U’s WaraWara Plaza from Wii U system version 1.0.0.

Image: HEYimHeroic/RTGames

Image: Nintendo

“Sometimes developers make ugly Miis just for fun,” says Alice. “But other ‘cursed’ Mii characters can really be used by game developers, such as testing how big a head can be without hair cutting through an accessory. And some Miis populate games that aren’t about Miis.”

In 2021, Alice discovered that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild used an advanced version of the Mii format called UMii to populate the massive open-world game by using similar parameters and attributes to those for traditional Mii characters.

UMii opened the floodgates BotW Modders to import and share their bizarre custom avatars into the map their work on Discord. After the discovery of Alice went viral on Twitter, she imported Twitch streamer RTGame’s famously cursed Mii “I want die”, with his signature big eyes and near-vertical eyebrows, in BotW‘s Kakariko Village – and received staggering praise from Twitter fans who immediately pointed out his hideous appearance. “Honestly, this might be more viscerally disturbing than the original,” said one user replied. “Well done!”

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via HEYimHeroic

Asked if they believe the legacy of cursed Mii aesthetics would weaken with the current oversaturation of customizable characters (Elder ring, Overexpected), Alice remains optimistic about the impact of Nintendo’s signature avatars.

“Recent Mii games like [Miitopia] further expanded Mii Customization,” says Alice. “People have made viral content like Squidward through them. I think if Nintendo had leaned more towards cursed Miis [for] the Wii U, they would have sold more units. This is exactly what I want my family to see on Christmas Day when we open our new console. So I guess cursed Miis will be here as long as there are memes.”

That doesn’t mean all unexpected Mii characters should be considered cursed, says Alice. After all, Nintendo is a Japanese company, and what Western audiences might see as cursed can sometimes just be the result of a culture gap. Some Mii characters designed by Nintendo Japan actually are based on Japanese celebrities, such as the wide grin by Sanma Akashiya.

This doesn’t detract from the nostalgic charm these Mii characters exude to the world of video game fashion aesthetics. Witness your Peter Griffin Mii gossip in the Wii U Mii Plaza with a Japanese celebrity, while your own Mii walks briskly past, builds a memorable, perhaps even utopian, life within the digital world. The next time I pass by my hometown, I’ll be sure to dust off our old Wii to browse the cursed horrors of yesteryear, grateful that this customization menu brought together gamer and non-gamer, grandparent with grandchild, novice with expert mud.