To say that Nintendo has been smug since the Wii became such a huge success is something of an understatement. The company’s press conferences have devolved into long sessions of self-fellatio and big numbers, but it’s thanks to Nintendo of America marketing executive Perrin Kaplan that Nintendo has become officially the most self-satisfied corporation in all of gaming.
Stating that gamers were bored without even knowing it until Nintendo came along, Kaplan essentially claims to be a mindreader. That’s right folks, Nintendo apparently is better at knowing you than you are. If you think you had fun in the PlayStation 2 era, you are actually tricking yourself with fake memories — the PS2 wasn’t fun until its games had waggle controls!
“A major insight that Nintendo had early on was that they saw that gamers were getting bored, even though they didn’t know it yet,” Kaplan pretentiously said. “Just look at the way people consume entertainment today. The idea that you would spend hours playing video games is just not real anymore.” Nintendo is able to see into the homes of millions of people twenty four hours a day.
Fair play to Nintendo, it has had amazing success and is currently dominating the market, but the smugness has to stop. The claim that gamers were “bored and didn’t know it yet” is unfounded and, if actual comments from gamers are to be believed, not true. Many of us still use the PS2 more than anything else, and there are countless complaints about the lack of fun original games on the Wii. While I won’t dispute the success of the Nintendo, I will dispute pompous untruth like this. Nintendo did not single-handedly save videogaming with the Wii, and the company needs to stop pretending that it did.
