Reggie Fils-Aime is easily one of the most influential people in all of gaming, and for good reason. When he was head of Nintendo of America, things took a drastic turn upward for the company. He had the presence, the foresight, and the confidence to voice things and to get things done. And in his new book, “Disrupting The Game”, he’s revealing a lot of things about his time with Nintendo and rising up in the industry. But what may surprise people was that he was the one who not only advocated for Wii Sports to be bundled for free with the launching Wii system, he had to fight for it.
And by “fight for it”, he had to go up against the heads of Nintendo in Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto.
“I advocated packing Wii Sports with Wii so that every consumer would get access to this great content. After I made this suggestion, Mr. Iwata paused long enough for me to notice the faint buzz of the incandescent lighting in his office, and get uncomfortable. ‘Reggie,’ Mr. Iwata said. ‘Nintendo does not give away precious content for free. We work hard to create special experiences. It is unique software that motivates consumers to buy our hardware, and we expect to sell these games over extended periods of time. No, we should not pack in Wii Sports.’
‘Mr. Iwata, I understand the value of our software. I know unique software has always differentiated Nintendo. But we know that Wii is a very different concept in the history of video games. Wii focuses on unique gameplay. The goal of Wii is to expand gaming from its current niche to a mass market medium. Wii Sports has the power to do this. Wii Sports can be a unifying element for all players of the system, and be a key motivation for people to buy the system and have fun immediately. Plus Mr. Iwata, I know Nintendo has history using packed-in software to drive a system.’ I knew this from personal experience as I had bought my Super Nintendo Entertainment System with a bundle that included Super Mario World.”
The discussion took many months, and a compromise was eventually made that in the west, Wii Sports would be put with the Wii, and in Japan, it would be sold separately. The game went on to sell 86 million units, and helped set the stage for the Wii to be (until the Switch that is) the best-selling Nintendo console ever.
In short, Reggie was right.
