My eyes and ears are ready
A new Reggie Fils-Aime SXSW panel? Don’t mind if I do!
The former Nintendo of America president spoke on multiple topics on a SXSW (South by Southwest) panel back in mid-March, and now the entire thing is online via the official SXSW YouTube account.
For those of you familiar with his story and his MO, some of this Reggie SXSW panel will be remedial. But he also opens up about several issues that are directly gaming/Nintendo related, including some moments on his mentor and friend: Satoru Iwata. It gets Nintendo-centric pretty quickly actually, just six minutes in.
Reggie talks about how in 2003, “Nintendo was in a tough position,” given the popularity of the PS2, and how it was “running away with the industry.” He says that “all of his advisors” told him not to take the job at Nintendo of America, because of the difficulty of working for a “Japanese parent company,” and the “cultural differences” therein; on top of the difficulty of bringing Nintendo out of the GameCube slump. But ultimately, it was meeting Iwata that convinced him to join (a process he says almost cost him the job, as some in the company did not like the audacity of a “brash American” asking to meet Nintendo’s president).
He also gets ample time to plug his own book, which is out in May and will be narrated by himself in audio form. Much of it will provide new details of his life growing up in the Bronx and the path that led him to where he is today. He notes, in the panel, that the main point of the book is to provide “perspective on the things he’s done and the choices he’s made.”
