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). 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. 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. I tried desperately to come up with some explanation that meshed with what Sacca saw. Sacca discusses "the Nintendo Wii story" with CNN Money at the 2016 Collision conference. Yet Sacca also seemed pretty confident in citing a "Wii Tennis global leaderboard." It's a story he's repeated at a convention and in a podcast in recent years, citing "global leaderboards" both times. I literally wrote an entire reference book about the Wii, in which Wii Sports filled an entire chapter, so I'm pretty confident on this point. There is no "settings pages" on the system or the game to let you compare your performance to anyone else online. Wii Sports doesn't have any "global leaderboard," as Sacca claims. Reading this detailed explanation only set off more alarm bells in my head. “In fact,” he continued, “on the Wii Tennis global leaderboard, I am currently tied for second in the world.” While talking, he used his controller to navigate through the settings pages on the Wii to a list of high scores. I’ve played a fair amount of Wii Tennis before,”. a touch of consolation" to his vanquished opponent:
The key detail in Sacca's story comes next, when Kalanick tries to "offer.
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"With full Princess Bride panache," as Sacca writes, Kalanick switched to his dominant hand and proceeded to win every single point going forward. until the Uber executive revealed that he was using his weaker hand. In a 2015 Medium post, Sacca uses a "Wii Tennis" anecdote to highlight Kalanick's extreme competitiveness.Īs the story goes, during a holiday get-together with friends and family, Sacca's father challenged Kalanick to "a friendly Wii Tennis match." The elder Sacca held his own against Kalanick. What Sacca sawįor more details on the "Wii Tennis" story, we need to rely on Chris Sacca, the ( recently retired) silicon valley investor who became something of a household name through ABC's Shark Tank. As it turns out, getting to the bottom of Kalanick's Wii Sports skill requires delving into the vagaries of human memory, reverse engineered asymptotic leveling systems, and the semantic meaning of video game achievement itself. I've spent an admittedly ridiculous amount of time looking into this one sentence over the past few days. What's more, the paper of record doesn't hedge its declaration with a "he said" or "he claimed." Kalanick's "Wii Tennis" high score is stated as a fact, and one that piece author Mike Isaac said on Twitter was "triple sourced." (Isaac didn't respond to further request for comment on his basis for the line.) If this was just a fabulist boast, why limit yourself to number two? And if it wasn't just puffery, who was number one? Kalanick hadn't earned the best "Wii Tennis" score in the world according to The New York Times.
Absent some sort of sanctioned tournament or logical third-party ranking system, the claim just doesn't parse.Īnd yet, the boast is oddly specific. 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.
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. "In other personal pursuits, he once held the world’s second-highest score for the Nintendo Wii Tennis video game." But there was one incidental, almost throwaway line buried in the piece that made me stop in my tracks: Further Reading Uber’s app fingerprinted iPhone hardware, breaking App Store rules 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.
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