Even though we’ve just entered a new era of Nintendo of America, Reggie Fils-Aimé is still the name most people associate with the role. And, speaking at this weekend’s New York Game Awards, the former NoA president shared a little tidbit about his time early on in his career at Nintendo (thanks, Gamesradar+!)
Just a week into his role as executive vice president of sales, Reggie had to deal with an issue surrounding one of Nintendo’s biggest names — Pokémon, specifically the first GBA titles, Ruby & Sapphire.
He didn’t bring this up by coincidence — Reggie was at the ceremony presenting the Andrew Yoon Legend Award to the franchise. And it’s here where he brought up his first professional brush with the series which he says he “had a long history with Pokémon when I was at Nintendo.”
Kicking off, Reggie told the audience about his first week at Nintendo in 2003: “I has just joined the company and [was] there for only about a week when I had to work with our retail partners because they literally did not have enough copies of Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Emerald [note: Reggie probably means Sapphire as Emerald launched in the West in 2005] for the Christmas rush.”
Reggie recalls that retailer were understandably “a little upset”, and given the huge popularity of the series even then, that’s pretty understandable. It was an early test, and lesson, for the then-new exec, who said that “I never let that happen ever again.”
Image: The Pokémon Company
Reggie concluded his speech with this, before rolling a heartfelt clip from industry members sharing their memories of the series: “I always enjoyed working with The Pokémon Company and I loved all of their games — even the Pokémon Plus controller [the Poké Ball Plus] with the Mew inside, remember that? One of my favourites.”
So, perhaps not the best start, but at least it allowed Reggie to make things right quickly and improve relations between Nintendo and TPC. So, all in all, a valuable moment in his career.
You can catch Reggie’s speech, as well as the Andrew Yoon Legend Award presentation, at around 2:49:56.
If you missed the entire awards ceremony, you may have also missed Reggie introducing the newest Nintendo of America president, Devon Pritchard, making her first public appearance since she took over the role at the start of the year.
Let us know what you think of Reggie’s story in the comments section below.
[source gamesradar.com]
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Alana has been with Nintendo Life since 2022, and while RPGs are her first love, Nintendo is a close second. She enjoys nothing more than overthinking battle strategies, characters, and stories. She also wishes she was a Sega air pirate.