When I listen to the typical executive blowhard from any number of corporations talk about their product, either here at Infendo or for my less exciting job as a reporer, they usually don’t sound as though they really, really enjoy what they’re selling. It’s a means to an end; a product to be sold; a way to shoehorn some new proprietary format into the laps of we the consumers. But — and my bias is showing — not with Reggie. Reggie Fils-Aimes may be a salesman by trade, but as the head of Nintendo he’s been nothing but a true fanboy of all things Big N.
In an interview with AOL, we see Reggie the dad, the cutthroat, the salesman, and even Reggie the aspiring dive instructor (it’s at the end). But for some reason, this passage is what stuck out in my mind:
Well, I remember those days. I was a parent to kids with an age range from four to eight years old, and I remember sitting around playing SNES with my kids.
I’ll tell you a story — I was playing ”˜Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past.’ I would stay up to the wee hours of the morning playing that game. And in the daytime, my son, who was probably about seven years old at the time, would play the levels I had beaten.
So I get to the final boss. I’m going to beat Ganon for the final level of the game. It’s probably 4 o’clock in the morning, I said [to myself], ‘You know what? I’m going to stop here so I can be fresh and beat this level in the morning.’ You can probably tell what happens, right? So my son gets on the system the next day, sees that I’ve gotten to the final boss, and he beats the boss. He finishes the game before I do. He stole my thunder.
That little bastard. But anyway, for some reason this just rang a little more true than a cold CEO rambling off technical specs. We gamers don’t always think about the business side of things as we’re mashing buttons (or, soon, waving our arms), but having a team at the top that actually uses the product their selling and enjoys it is almost as important as the games that will make or break the system.