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Thursday, February 21, 2019

Reggie Fils-Aime Retiring; Doug Bowser Promoted To President of Nintendo of America

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - By the way, KoopaTV is the site that cared the most about Doug Bowser prior to today.

Today in the news, current Nintendo of America President and Chief Operating Officer Reggie Fils-Aime (alternatively Reggie Fils-Aimé) announced that he will be retiring from Nintendo effective April 15. Since KoopaTV has more important things to publish on April 15, I'll be writing my thoughts on this now.

Perhaps more important than Reggie retiring (at the age of 57—but I have no doubt he's rich) is who is retiring him: Doug Bowser, who joined Nintendo in 2015 as Vice President of Sales. Mr. Bowser later got promoted to Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing after the departure of Scott Moffitt, Nintendo's previous Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing. (Mr. Bowser and Mr. Moffitt happen to look pretty much identical.)


I'm not going to go over a retrospective of the career of Reggie Fils-Aime or write about memes spawned because of him, because that's sappy, cliché, and I don't think you care. I know I don't. A long-time KoopaTV reader recently asked me who Reggie Fils-Aime even is. I'll just say this: Prior to becoming President and Chief Operating Officer of Nintendo of America in 2006, Reggie was also the Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing.

Nintendo's current worldwide president, Shuntaro Furukawa, was the lead in charge of the Global Marketing Department.

It seems that in Nintendo, being in leadership marketing roles is a great place for even further advancement within the company. Take that as you wish.

The stock market raised Nintendo's stock by almost 5% upon the news, which suggests Reggie is past his prime.

People crying over him retiring is ridiculous. He's not dead. He's not even fired. Don't be a weakling. Respect that Reggie is a grown man with his own life and he doesn't want to be working 16 hours a day running a company if he doesn't have to.

Though it does make me wonder what it means for that moment in The Game Awards 2018 (the last time we saw Reggie) where he and the heads of Xbox and PlayStation stood together. Then he goes and retires right afterwards. Guess he just can't take any more appearances of that fraudulent awards show. Good thing Doug Bowser was in the audience and can carry on Nintendo's absurd policy of giving that show legitimacy!

As for Doug Bowser, he's been quoted in over 100 Nintendo press releases for several years now, but no one else outside of KoopaTV has ever cared about him in-between his hiring in 2015 to his promotion now, and those people only cared then because of his last name. These same people who have been treating him very shallowly for the past four years are going to do the same crying act when Doug Bowser retires from his position later.

He may share the name Bowser, but he's much more akin to TROJAN BOWSER than my father.

I'm just waiting for Shigeru Miyamoto to retire.

One last note: People on the Internet are stealing the KoopaTV-captured photo of Doug Bowser from the 2015 article with Mario and Luigi tied up by a controller, and not giving credit to the source. If you see that, tell them they're jerks and to credit KoopaTV. Thanks.


This article makes it seem like Ludwig doesn't care about Reggie at all. That's not quite accurate to his feelings, but he finds absolutely no reason for an emotional response, and he's gotten over Reggie memes a long time ago. He finds it rather distasteful to reduce people to memetic status in any case. Feel free to disagree in the comments section.


KoopaTV wrote a parody fake news article back in 2016 about Reggie Fils-Aime resigning from Nintendo to join a position within the President Donald John Trump administration. Wouldn't it be funny if that actually happened now?
Reggie has now retired and no longer works for Nintendo. Now he has made a Twitter account.

How does Doug Bowser compare to Reggie? Quite similarly.

6 comments :

  1. I get why people would get sentimental over Reggie since he was a big public figure and face of Nintendo. I was puzzled at some people giving Kimishima this treatment when he hadn't been around very long and mostly just did typical business stuff. It is important as it looks like it caps off the end of the Iwata/Reggie era where Nintendo CEOs were big public figures who acted as the faces of the company. I expect Doug Bowser to be more reserved as Iwata's successors will be. Bowser's background leads me to believe that he's going to be a very effective marketer and better for NOA than Reggie was, but he won't have the personality. So it's not really something to get weepy over, but it is a weird feeling.

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    Replies
    1. Kimishima didn't have any public personality at all, and neither does Furukawa so far.

      I don't think there's any correlation between public personality leaders and company performance. Yes on how the leaders are perceived within the company (I've read Reggie was very well-liked among NOA employees and he was nice to the lower-level staff, that kind of person), but to us? Not really.
      And I dunno how people are crying that Reggie is being replaced by a guy who, from what I can tell from his press release statements, doesn't have an interesting personality. But I want interesting personalities reserved for characters in Nintendo's games, not necessarily Nintendo's staff.

      Obviously 95% of Reggie's activity was typical business stuff we don't see, where he's probably your average competent businessdude and not a meme. I don't think his fans appreciate that bit.

      Also, WELCOME to the KoopaTV on-site comments section! :D

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    2. Doug Bowser was the guy behind the Switch's successful marketing campaign, so based on that it seems as though he'll be an improvement over Reggie on the business side of things. But I do think that the Kimishima/Furukawa/Bowser transitions reflect a move towards more typical executives and they're going to leave Nintendo Direct personalities and the like to other people, which is honestly probably for the best. Also it'll make it easier to evaluate their business performance more rationally as opposed to being personally attached to meme personalities while ignoring the actual important business decisions.

      Delete
    3. Completely agreed in terms of where the trend is going and how not having personal attachment to people as characters makes it better to evaluate them.

      That's why KoopaTV isn't trying to have attachment to Doug Bowser despite his name, though it's hard not to when people are coming in and stealing our screen-grab of him from five years ago. Now it's on knowyourmeme!

      Delete
    4. My stolen Plush Marie with Pizza pic sympathizes with you.

      Delete
    5. My QA Department (Rawk) has a philosophical objection to watermarking, and I'm being driven in the pro-watermarking direction.

      Delete

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