11 Years a Slave: One Man’s Spiral into Wii Fit Induced Insanity

06/01/2019 WeekendAtMartys

Video games are a fun hobby that millions of people, young and old partake in to unwind from stressful days. However for almost 11 years a Sheboygan Wisconsin man has been living the grips of a crippling addiction to playing a game that no one has cared about for almost a decade. For over 11 years Mark Smith has been playing Wii Fit every day for 16 hours a day. Together with his wife Kimmy, the Smith’s are 2/3rds of the Wii Fit speedrunning community and they also own some 7000 snails, which they farm for extra income to fuel Mark’s passion, playing Wii Fit.

(Mark getting ready for  a gaming session)

Wii Fit, is a game that requires one to do various poses and some light psychical activity to the instruction of the games trainers. Upon meeting Mark for the first time we were in shock that someone who plays an exercise game nearly nonstop for over a decade could be morbidly obese but after watching his wife Kimmy feeding him an entire packet of corndogs in one sitting we stopped having such questions. “He’s kind of big fucking deal”, she says “he’s only 10 seconds away from breaking any percent Wii Fit speedrun record set by that Korean bastard, Pan Yueng Sook, on that faithful day in 2010”. The faithful day she is referring to is when a Korean man playing Wii Fit, became the second person to upload a speedrun time to the Wii Fit’s speedrunning board, besting Mark’s time by 10 seconds. To date they are the only two have actually upload a time and Mr. Yueng Sook did not respond to our requests for an interview.

The Smiths also stream on the popular streaming platform Twitch. Kim tells me that Mark is the next Ninja and that people from all over world come to the streams and cheer Mark on. However after a second look at Mark and Kim’s channel it appears that the only people that watch are edgy teens making fun of their girth and the stains on Mark’s shirts from the corndogs that Kim keeps feeding him on a hourly basis. And the odd person that confuses the Smiths for the American Boxer Butterbean and a talking bean bag chair. During any given stream the viewer count doesn’t exceed 4 viewers and their patreon has been setting a $1 since last October.

As the day wore on we were alerted to a possible threat from Kim. Apparently the snails found communism and plotted an overthrow of the “oppressors” arming themselves with makeshift fighter jets, attacking the couple.  Upon meeting the snails in combat, Mark and Kim where entrenched in a scene that looked awfully familiar to King Kong, when King Kong scales the Empire State building and is fighting off planes. Anyways after seeing the 2nd Mollusks army take the kitchen, we decided to end the interview early and retreat to our vehicle where a charming young snail named Andrei, gave us a propaganda booklet for reading on the flight home.

  (the cover of the communist snail pamphlet from Andrei)

We promptly threw it away of course but the thought was nice, I think. Last I heard, the communist snail uprising failed at the kitchen and they were promptly shipped off to France. Mark and Kim scared, decided that it would be best to raise plants to generate extra money.