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[Makonero]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017...lly-the-second-best-wii-sports-tennis-player/

Last weekend's New York Times profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had plenty of important revelations about Kalanick and the company he runs, both of which have been facing some tough PR lately. But there was one incidental, almost throwaway line buried in the piece that made me stop in my tracks:

"In other personal pursuits, he once held the world's second-highest score for the Nintendo Wii Tennis video game."

The line baffled me for a number of reasons, not least of which was that the concept of a "high score" in "Wii Tennis" didn't make much sense. Claiming the "world's second-highest score" in Wii Sports tennis is like claiming the second-highest score in Pong based on nothing but playing against the computer and your friends. Absent some sort of sanctioned tournament or logical third-party ranking system, the claim just doesn't parse.

I tried desperately to come up with some explanation that meshed with what Sacca saw. Were they maybe playing on the Wii U re-release of Wii Sports Club, which did feature online multiplayer and regional leaderboards? Sacca said the story takes place on "New Year's Day, 2010 I believe," well before the Wii U was available, so that doesn't help.

Were they possibly playing another tennis game on the Wii? Titles like EA's Grand Slam Tennis and Sega's Virtua Tennis 2009 seem to have online competition, after all. This also feels unlikely; Wii Sports has been a pack-in game and primary system seller for the Wii since its 2006 launch, to the point that "Wii Tennis" can safely be assumed as the tennis mode in that game (though the wording is frustrating for the sake of clarity, in this case).

Maybe Kalanick had navigated to some sort of online score listing via the Wii's Web browser? There are a few sites that maintain high score lists for some Wii Sports training modes and the game's "skill level." However, Sacca refers to it specifically as a "settings page on the Wii" in multiple tellings, and training mode scores don't seem a likely focus for this kind of boast (Twin Galaxies, the closest thing to official scorekeepers that the industry has, says it has no idea what Sacca is referring to, for what it's worth).

While Wii Sports doesn't have any online leaderboards, it does have one in-game measure of progress through each of its component sports. This "skill level" is an Elo-style measure of performance that goes up and down depending on how well you do against the computer-controlled AI.
The skill level is the closest thing to an overarching "score" that it makes sense to refer to in Wii Sports, though I'd argue calling it a "score" is incorrect at worst and misleading at best. In any case, I believe confusion over this skill level is probably at the heart of Kalanick and Sacca's "Wii Tennis" claims.

The most detailed and accurate breakdown of the Wii Sports tennis skill level system I've been able to find is here. The full explanation gets into some pretty detailed math, so here's a brief summary:

In Wii Sports, every Mii you use starts with a skill level of zero. Every time you beat a computer opponent, that skill level increases based on your score in that match and the (simulated) skill level of the opponent.

The skill level of your next computer opponent goes up alongside your skill level until you face the top-ranked computer opponents in the game, Elisa and Sarah, who have skill levels of 2000 and 1900 respectively.

With Kalanick and Uber yet to respond to a request for comment, the rest of this piece necessarily delves into speculation of what's driving Kalanick's Wii Sports "high score" claim. That said, I think the explanation detailed below adequately explains all the claimed facts involved with a few small wriggles to account for the vagaries of human memory.

So with all that preamble, here's what I think actually led to the "second-highest score" claim:

• Sometime after Wii Sports comes out, Kalanick plays in-game tennis obsessively to the point where he can beat the computer perfectly and reliably. He works his skill level up to 2399 after dozens of matches.
  
• Noting the diminishing returns in skill level increase, Kalanick searches online to find out how hard it would be to push his skill level higher. He finds the page mentioned above, which claims it would take tens of thousands of games to get that 2400 skill level. He stops pushing for a higher level, satisfied that he has reached the second-highest level possible.
  
• Later, with Sacca and friends and family around, Kalanick proceeds to show off his pre-existing skill level of 2399 (which is visible on an easy-to-access graph via an in-game menu). He explains that 2399 is the second-highest "score" possible in the game, meaning he's tied for second.
  
• Kalanick mentions the story of the mythical 2400 level player that he saw online. The assembled guests discuss whether someone actually played 900 hours of Wii Sports to get that ranking or whether the ostensible No. 1 might have skipped the grind by hacking the software or the controller.
  
• Years later, through the vagaries of memory, that discussion of relative "high scores" (and the on-screen graph of Kalanick's single-player skill level performance) becomes, in the retelling, an online "global leaderboard" that confirmed Kalanick's second-place position.

Fascinating stuff. WAY more at the link. BTW I'm the best Wii Bowling player (I got a 300 therefore no one can beat me!).

 

[Glass Shark]

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[Jakoo]

Maybe I am misremembering, but wasn't there online play/scoreboards in the Wii Sports Club version on the Wii U?

EDIT: It appears there was as per this link: http://wiisportsclub.nintendo.com/online-play/

I've never played this iteration of the game but when I heard the StartUp Podcast where this claim was made, I always assumed the dude was playing on the Wii U version.

EDIT2: I see that they mentioned this in the piece itself:

I tried desperately to come up with some explanation that meshed with what Sacca saw. Were they maybe playing on the Wii U re-release of Wii Sports Club, which did feature online multiplayer and regional leaderboards? Sacca said the story takes place on "New Year's Day, 2010 I believe," well before the Wii U was available, so that doesn't help.

 

[chaobreaker]

Travis Kalanick and Chris Sacca are self-aggrandizing tech bros who will stop at nothing to convey an image of "winning" to the world. They're both lying out of their asses to seem better than they are and to have a funny anecdote in their back pocket.

This is the second "investigation" into this factoid in as many days and neither writer has the guts to come right out and just say they're lying. It's maddening.

Probably because it would risk their future press access with Uber and Chris Sacca.

And yeah, Sacca is a dick. The kind that unironically says "Do you know who I am" when his counterfeit Hamilton tickets don't get him a seat at the show.

Maybe I am misremembering, but was there online play/scoreboards in the Wii Sports Club version on the Wii U?

Article points out that the statement of the scoreboards happened years before the Wii U and Wii Sports Club were ever a thing.

 

[Smasher89]

A big problem with the game, is that there were a way to return a ball after the opponent served, that were in no way possible to catch as the server,

Rhe timing to hit the ball for it were easy enough to do on projector even, making the game basicly rps on who gets to serve second to win the sets!

 

[Fisty]

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