On Reggie

Reggie Fils-Aimé didn’t need to do any of this. The dancing, the mugging, the fake fighting; the beloved persona he built never needed to exist. It almost never did, too; it’s still not general knowledge that he had to be talked into telling a crowd at Nintendo’s 2004 E3 show that “my name is Reggie, I’m about kickin’ ass, I’m about takin’ names, and we’re about makin’ games.” That presentation – his first public appearance as Nintendo’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing – defined how much of the gaming public saw this former Procter & Gamble brand manager for the next fifteen years, a macho giant who sold Nintendo games with an enthusiasm that bordered on zealotry. Often called the “Regginator” by fans, boasting that “my body is ready” for anything from fitness games to fighting games, his time at the company is legendary in a very public way. And on April 15, after helping oversee five major hardware releases and countless modern entries in the pantheon of great games, he’ll be leaving Nintendo. Like a number of other fans, I’ve been thinking a bit about what that all means.

I highly recommend Chris Kohler’s Kotaku article on that 2004 presentation, because it gets at why Reggie became such a big deal. He was selling a video game company lagging behind the competition, one incessantly harangued for its continued focus on “little kids.” The typically conservative Nintendo was only more so in the 2000s, with then-Nintendo of America president and future overall Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima carrying a stoicism that left few engaged with Mario and Link’s latest adventures. Reggie introduced himself as Vice President of Marketing and Sales (he became NoA president in 2006) – and, implicitly, a new direction for Nintendo – through this absurdly macho braggadocio. He took jabs at the competition less for their games than their treatment of consumers; he cursed, something unthinkable coming from a Nintendo leader. His speech was capped off with the first trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a game that has been defined since as the “mature” Zelda, the one players most associated with Reggie’s bravado. But I want to focus on one lesser discussed part of that presentation which so electrified fans:

“We’re not going to run our company just for hardcore gamers. There are gamers out there who aren’t as knowledgeable as you. Gamers who aren’t your age. Gamers who don’t have your tastes.”

As much as Reggie became an instant (and long-lived) meme of domineering might, something not exactly uncommon in this industry, his energy was used to sell predominately family friendly games. Nintendo wasn’t deceiving anyone with the kind of “X-treme” ads it and SEGA used in the Nineties. Other than building Twilight Princess up as a serious affair, they weren’t claiming the games would be anything but the well-built toys Nintendo makes. Reggie’s macho posturing was more a show that, ironically, Nintendo didn’t need to do that with its own games to be successful and acclaimed. The argument that courting hardcore gamers should never come at the expense of less involved players was a somewhat radical idea at the time, and Reggie’s intensity gave it weight. It helped pave the way for Nintendo’s “blue ocean strategy” of targeting the “non-gamers” its rivals Sony and Microsoft ignored, a tactic that propelled the Nintendo DS and Wii to titanic commercial success.

One of the many mid-Aughts memes about Reggie in the wake of his presentation.

And the fact that Nintendo wasn’t macho would be good for Reggie, too. Over the course of his time with Nintendo, he presented less of that early bombast, typically acting as a charismatic and serious salesman with an unflappable love of whatever game he was pushing. That over the top boasting never fully went away, but only in smaller bits – and always as something with which he was constantly playing (beating a life-sized Mii of himself in arm wrestling, for instance). I’m not sure whether that was because Fils-Aimé wasn’t entirely comfortable with the attitude or whether it was just a natural evolution of the character, but it worked. The persona would’ve grated had it been been too prominent; he’d have been noxious and overbearing. In the end, we always got just enough of that part of him, with fans reliably turning every comment of his into a meme about the unstoppable Regginator anyway. The consistent devotion he showed to his argument that every Nintendo product was good (and, of course, worthy of your hard-earned cash) was powerful, and honestly kind of pleasing in a way that’s hard to describe. These were “just” sales pitches, of course, but it was hard not to sense a love in them of not just selling, but especially of selling these games.

Reggie’s desk was always cluttered with new games to sell, old toys of Nintendo characters, and one custom amiibo of himself sent in by a fan.

The commercially fallow Wii U years led to Nintendo taking on a more distinctive, friendly affect, with its executives acting in simple and accessible “Nintendo Direct” presentations. Reggie’s actual presence was more limited than fans remember; he showed up somewhat rarely – especially after his colleague, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, passed away in 2015 (and, of course, he only appeared in the American broadcasts). But his appearances typically came as either the friendly but focused businessman or a demented goofball. The 2014 E3 show showed the latter at his best: he jumped in a “Fils-a-Mech” to announce the presentation, incinerated a journalist asking about MOTHER 3 (a personal bugbear of his) in a Robot Chicken sketch, and, to promote the upcoming Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS & Wii U, engaged Iwata in a anime-style mock battle. Things that could have been the mighty return of Tough Guy Reggie were funny and surreal, giving fans invested in that character what they wanted but still tongue in cheek enough that it couldn’t be taken seriously. At a live Smash Bros. event the next year, he got creamed – hilariously so – by a high level player after some enjoyable trash talking on his part. He and Nintendo did a lot to keep the persona enjoyable and fresh over the years.

The last major appearance of Reggie’s “non-normal” persona, in 2015, was a three part YouTube series for the western release of Yo-Kai Watch. It featured him and other Nintendo staffers getting “possessed” by the series’ poltergeists, dancing badly while the company’s longtime localization head Bill Trinen attacked a box of confections. It’s an utterly bizarre, utterly wonderful sequence, and it shows how fans got so much out of the man. He’s a bit awkward and bit stilted, but always committing – and specifically to bits that are outright embarrassing (I have no doubt Nintendo wanted these to be memes, but these still ask a lot of a person). Reggie as a public figure was as chimerical as he was charming, another reason he was so enduring; he could be what fans wanted, and entertaining in any role. In a way, that alone made him a great representative for Nintendo, a company that builds gardens of dynamic player expression for as many people as possible.

Reggie promoting the Switch.

It merits a note that Fils-Aimé was never, as far as we know, involved with Nintendo’s game making in a creative capacity. His leadership and work at the company was immensely important for how their games were marketed and sold, and that probably did loop back around into how they were made, at least to some extent. But he wasn’t a creative wunderkind like Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto or a creative and commercial polymath like Iwata, the two men who, alongside Reggie, helped define Nintendo from the mid-Aughts to the 2010s. He occupied a rare position in fans’ heads: a person both known and distinctly loved just for selling games. It’s rare to think of purely commercial gaming figures who garner actual affection and respect – take Activision’s loathed and loathsome Bobby Kotick, for instance – let alone the deep well of affection fans had for Reggie. The sheer amount of love and support that poured out when he announced his retirement on February 21 is not a normal thing we see in this industry by any means.

From the 2015 E3 presentation, where Fils-Aimé, Iwata, and Miyamoto performed as muppets.

And he was important to Nintendo far more than just a persona. Their greatest commercial successes of the last fifteen years came partially from the work he and the localization teams at Nintendo of America did, developing campaigns and advertising we take for granted. Successes that are no brainers to us now – a home console you can take on the go, sports games played with a flick of the wrist – weren’t at the time by any means. It’s impossible to know how involved he was with every individual decision or success, but during his tenure Nintendo reached its greatest commercial peak in the Wii and constant sales records of theirs broken by the Switch. It also signified a time where Nintendo started to reach out to other studios far more than ever before, with independent developers currently a titanium backbone of the Switch’s success. Those were not happy accidents, and the level of esteem in which Nintendo’s Japanese leadership openly held him implies a great deal (it also merits mention that a black American having his level of power in an historically Japanese company is in itself a rarity). As fun as the “Reggie” character was and is, it was easy to forget that it was only ever one part of him as a person or a leader in the industry.

Nintendo fans, Reggie has a message for all of you. Please take a look. pic.twitter.com/EAhaEl5oEJ

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) February 21, 2019

Reggie’s leaving doesn’t just leave a great hole in Nintendo; it also signifies the end of a massive chunk of the company’s history. The period between his 2005 speech and now has been one of remarkable evolution in how their games are seen and understood and even made. While never a creative figure in the making of games, he was instrumental in changing how people thought about and discussed Nintendo. For fans, he provided an out for those self-conscious about Nintendo’s kid-friendly games or poor placement in the asinine “console wars.” For some critics, he may have influenced a change to how Nintendo’s games (which were still critically acclaimed, but often treated more as curios) were presented in the public sphere. And the slow increase in third party support on Nintendo’s systems had to have come at least partially from the work he and other members of the company did courting other publishers. One of the biggest paradigm shifts of Nintendo’s past few years, a new collaborative relationship with its hardware rival Microsoft, would have been unthinkable even five years ago. It’s impossible that Reggie wasn’t heavily involved in something of that magnitude, developing over the course of years a space where that could even exist at all.

I think that’s where I’m at, this sense of awe at the version of Nintendo Reggie helped build. It was never just him, of course, but he was a fundamental force in how Nintendo has changed so wildly for a decade and a half. It may be glib to note the size of the shoes Fils-Aimé’s successor Doug Bowser has to fill, but Reggie really did oversee changes to Nintendo on a scale that’s hard to fully quantify. And through it he gave us a wonderful character and persona, someone who was always enjoyable and compelling. That will be missed, and it will be remembered.