This year’s Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle (PAX West 23) started Friday with a well-attended keynote speech by Reggie Fils-Aimé, who took the stage to discuss his personal business philosophies and the principles that have motivated his career.
In the games industry, Fils-Aimé is most famous for his time at Nintendo of America, where he retired as president in April 2019. That was the capstone for a nearly 15-year run that saw Fils-Aimé become one of the public faces of Nintendo as a company, alongside game developers like Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.
Famously, Fils-Aimé’s big debut as a Nintendo employee came at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May 2004, where Fils-Aimé, then a recently-hired executive VP of sales and marketing, took the stage, and famously said, “My name is Reggie. I’m about kicking ass, I’m about taking names, and we’re about making games.”
That moment was one of several in the montage that introduced Fils-Aimé’s PAX keynote, which included several noteworthy commercials and appearances on talk shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live.
In Fils-Aimé’s speech, he walked the audience through his personal history, starting from his childhood as the son of poor Haitian immigrants in New York. When he was young, Fils-Aimé’s family lived in a rough neighborhood in the Bronx, before later moving to Long Island when Fils-Aimé was 8 years old.
“I’m not unique,” Fils-Aimé said onstage. “I’m not the only person who’s grown up in a rough area. I was fortunate to have a loving family… They created the opportunity for me to have a different life and a better future. I took on the mindset to improve myself, to focus on the future and not on the past, so that neither me nor my own family would face similar hardships.”
Fils-Aimé graduated from Cornell in 1983 with a degree in applied economics; spent eight years at Procter & Gamble in its brand management program; and had stints at companies including Pizza Hut, VH1, Panda Express, and Guinness before landing at Nintendo in late 2003.
Elements of the talk drew on themes from his 2022 book, “Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo.”
He credits his successful run in business to a five-step philosophy that he laid out onstage, describing it as “Capability Meeting Opportunity” (above). The five steps Fils-Aimé outlined were:
- your past doesn’t define your future
- learn from the best
- say “yes” to challenges
- when you fail (and you will) fail forward
- make, and live with, difficult decisions
“I can’t tell you how many times I meet people who get stuck living in the past,” Fils-Aimé explained. “You can’t change your past. What you need to do is think about it and apply all those experiences as you walk forward… I believe that the past might shape us, but it doesn’t define us.”
He used further incidents from his career to illustrate each further step of his philosophy, from his childhood and college years to his involvement in the debuts of the Nintendo Wii, Wii-U, 3DS, and Switch video game consoles.
He cited Nintendo’s Takashi Tezuka (“Mario’s uncle, there from the very beginning”), Shinya Takahashi, and Kazuya Ibuchi as three unsung heroes who taught him a great deal while he was at the company, alongside more famous Nintendo employees like Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario series, whom Fils-Aimé calls “arguably the best game developer of all time.”
Fils-Aimé also took time to credit his friend and the late CEO of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, who died from cancer in 2015. Iwata and Nintendo’s “driving mantra” was to “do something unique,” which Fils-Aimé said matched well with his own “passion for disruptive innovation.”
At the time Fils-Aimé joined Nintendo, in 2003, he noted that Sony was far and away the market leader, due to its PlayStation 2 console featuring both backwards compatibility with the PlayStation library and the PS2 doubling as the most affordable DVD player on the consumer market at the time. In 2003, the year Fils-Aimé joined Nintendo, the announcement of Sony’s PlayStation Portable console – a handheld competitor for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance – made Nintendo’s stock plummet 10%.
Simultaneously, Microsoft had entered the console market at the same time as Nintendo had released its GameCube, in 2001. It had a runaway hit in the original Halo; the promise of connected play; and the willingness to lose money until it was firmly established in the sector.
Fils-Aimé was a fan of video games himself, but he noted that at the time he joined Nintendo, he “had not yet been compelled to buy the machine.” The GameCube was technically a powerful console, but famously, would release several classic games – the original Animal Crossing, Luigi’s Mansion, Super Smash Bros. Melee – then endure extended content droughts that could last as long as a year.
“So joining Nintendo in 2003 was a high-risk move,” Fils-Aimé said, “but I said yes to that challenge, and the trajectory of my own life and this video game industry changed forever.”
Other points from Fils-Aimé’s keynote included:
- Fils-Aimé cited the relative sales failure of the Wii-U as one of his examples of “failing forward.” After the Wii sold more than 100 million units, the Wii-U sank like a stone, only moving 13 million consoles before it was discontinued. However, the consumer feedback from the Wii-U’s unique tablet controller was what led Nintendo to develop its current best-selling console, the Switch.
- Fans have called Fils-Aimé one part of the “Nintendo Triforce” with Iwata and Miyamoto, which Fils-Aimé calls “incredibly humbling.” (The Triforce is a pyramid-shaped artifact in The Legend of Zelda, and reuniting its 3 parts has been a goal in several games in the series.)
- One of Fils-Aimé’s earlier challenges as a marketing professional was helping to establish the Panda Express fast-food chain after several earlier false starts. The issue, as Fils-Aimé saw it, was making the transition between the original restaurant and its desire to create a quick-service restaurant, which he worked at by interviewing both Panda staff and their typical customers.
- The Wii-U isn’t Nintendo’s greatest sales failure. That’s the Virtual Boy headset from 1995, which is the only Nintendo console to sell less than a million units. “Luckily,” Fils-Aimé said, “I had nothing to do with that.”
- The original plan for the Wii was to ship it by itself, without any games. Fils-Aimé argued at length with both Iwata and Miyamoto to package the system with Wii Sports, and eventually got his way for Wiis shipped in the Americas and Europe. Those territories subsequently led the market in Wii purchases, setting up the system’s initial momentum. “It was literally a bit of a test as to which approach would move the marketplace forward,” Fils-Aimé said, calling it a “billion-dollar decision.”
Related: Listen to Reggie Fils-Aimé on the GeekWire Podcast from May 2022.
