Seattle Times profiles the Regginator

Just a snippet from the Seattle Times profile of Reggie Fils-Aime that was published over the weekend to try and get the Wii fever up and over the 108 degree mark today. Right now I’d say it’s hovering at a cool 100, and we need to start hallucinating already.

As hard as Fils-Aime (pronounced Fees-uh-mey) has worked preparing North America for the Wii launch, his industry celebrity still dates back to one event: Nintendo’s press briefing at the 2004 Electronics Entertainment Expo convention. Fils-Aime, only a few months on the job at Nintendo after turning around the VH1 cable channel, busted out some of the most memorable lines in industry history: “My name is Reggie. I’m about kickin’ ass, I’m about takin’ names, and we’re about makin’ games.”

Maybe it was the way he said it. Maybe he gave Nintendo fans hope when the GameCube console was clearly struggling against Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation 2. Perhaps his words stood out compared with past Nintendo speeches, which were mostly rigid and rehearsed, and sometimes dreary.

The response was immediate and unexpected: Fans adopted him as the new face of Nintendo.

I think I need to sit down.