Reggie Fils-Aimé’s Disrupting the Game Is About as Underwhelming as a Wii U
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by Luke T. Harrington
Earlier this year, I read St. Athanasius’s biography of his mentor, St. Anthony the Great. It’s a pious sort of hagiography about how Anthony was born into privilege, grew disgusted with his own wealth, gave it all away, and moved himself permanently to the desert, where he met Satan face-to-face, resisted temptation, and eventually became the father of Christian monasticism. It’s a compelling story, if you’re into that sort of thing, and Athanasius’s awe for his mentor radiates off the page.
One wonders, though, how it would read if St. Anthony himself had written it.
Self-hagiography, at least in a religious sense, is somewhat rare—mainly, one assumes, because the ones who are humble enough to qualify as saints don’t talk (or write) about themselves all that much. The same, however, can’t be said about the business world, which rewards nothing more than ego. The shortest road to success is to never admit your own mistakes and to always take credit for other people’s successes—and so, whenever a corporate exec retires, the literary world is always forced to absorb one more self-congratulating memoir in order to sate his or her ego one last time. The latest self-hagiography in this particular genre is ex-Nintendo exec Reggie Fils-Aimé’s Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo.
For anyone who’s paid even a small amount of attention to the videogame industry over the last twenty years, Fils-Aimé needs no introduction. At the time he took the reins at Nintendo of America (as president and COO), the global corporation had been on the decline for two decades: each successive Nintendo console had sold fewer units than its predecessor, and Sony’s PlayStation brand owned more than half the market. Nintendo’s longtime rival Sega had given up on the hardware business, and there were rumors that Nintendo would, or should, do the same.
The moment Fils-Aimé first took the stage at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2004, however—brashly announcing, “I’m about kicking ass, I’m about taking names, and we’re about making games”—led to an endless deluge of worshipful internet memes and signaled a genuine sea change in the videogame industry. Under Fils-Aimé’s leadership, Nintendo would launch multiple hundred million–selling devices (including the Nintendo DS, the Wii, and the Nintendo Switch) and would retake its crown as an industry leader (albeit now a strange, quirky one).
It’s an open question, though, how much credit Fils-Aimé deserves for any of this, and how much he was just a compelling figurehead. As he himself will tell you, his background is in marketing, not hardware or software design. The products Nintendo of America was selling were all designed in Japan and then shipped to the States for Fils-Aimé to hype. Marketing is important, of course, and in many ways, Fils-Aimé’s accomplishments speak for themselves—but, that being the case, one wonders why we need a book about them.
In fact, there are several potential reasons for a book like Disrupting the Game to exist, but there’s a solid case that the book fails at all of them.
The first is that it’s intended as a business how-to manual—i.e., “Here’s how Reggie did it, so you can do it too!” That this was the intention is supported by the book’s publication by HarperCollins Leadership, the megapublisher’s business self-help brand, and each chapter has one or more sidebars titled “The So What,” in which Fils-Aimé tells you what business lessons you should take away from his experiences. Unfortunately, these are generally pretty mundane thoughts that anyone who’s ever even considered a career in business probably already knows—stuff like “protect your brand” and “execute your ideas well.” Good advice, but nothing earth-shattering.
The second possibility is that the assumed appeal here is the rags-to-riches story suggested by the book’s subtitle. It’s a reasonable assumption, but Disrupting the Game is hardly a tale of struggle. The question of “How did Reggie escape poverty?” is not given a particularly surprising answer—his parents taught him good values, he worked hard, and he was born with superhuman business sense. Fils-Aimé makes a couple of nods to the disadvantages that come with being a black man in America, but they’re brief and hesitant, suggesting he’s not really interested in courting readers looking to scratch an identity politics itch.
The third possibility—and the most likely one, given where I personally have noticed most of the promotion for the book (i.e., videogame podcasts) is that Disrupting the Game is intended as an behind-the-scenes account of the last twenty-ish years of Nintendo for curious videogame fans. On this front it fails as well, since the story of Fils-Aimé’s time at Nintendo—which takes up more than half the book—plays mainly just like a “greatest hits” of the things we all knew Nintendo was doing in the early twenty-first century. Did you know the Wii was a big hit with some great games and iconic commercials? Probably, but Fils-Aimé will absolutely tell you for the umpteenth time.
This aspect was particularly aggravating because, while Fils-Aimé’s tenure at Nintendo produced some of the company’s biggest hits, it also produced some of its most baffling failures. Remember the Wii’s successor, the Wii U? There’s a decent chance you actually don’t, given that it was one of the most notorious gaming hardware flops of this century. Everything about the console was infamously head-scratching: If motion controls were the key to the Wii’s success, why were they downplayed with the Wii U (in favor of a clunky touchscreen controller)? If this system was going after the iPad crowd, why was the touchscreen so tiny and ugly (and why was its battery life so short)? If the Wii U was for core gamers, why was it so underpowered? If it was for casual gamers, why was it so buggy and confusing? The Wii U, like Disrupting the Game, left many of us wondering who, exactly, the intended audience was.
If you were hoping to glean any insight into that, though, Disrupting the Game will disappoint you; while every other console released during Fils-Aimé’s tenure gets a full chapter in the book, the Wii U is given only a few paragraphs at the beginning of the chapter about its much more successful successor, the Nintendo Switch. The Wii U’s failure is noted with a shrug and an assurance that it was just the warmup for the Switch, and also that Fils-Aimé knew it wasn’t ready for primetime, but the suits in Japan just wouldn’t listen to him.
This general vibe, by the way—“I was right, everyone else was wrong”—is one that becomes something of a refrain throughout the book. Fils-Aimé insists that he knew the 3DS was overpriced from the beginning, leading to its initial lackluster sales, but (again) the guys in Japan wouldn’t listen. He wants credit for both introducing and killing off Pizza Hut’s Bigfoot Pizza, and insists both were the right decision. Even the mistake that ended his career with Procter and Gamble—going ahead with a Crisco advertising campaign without official approval—gets shrugged off as the right decision, just made a bit too hastily.
It’s possible all of these anecdotes are entirely accurate. It’s possible that Fils-Aimé actually was right whenever there was conflict—but it doesn’t make for compelling reading. It doesn’t make Fils-Aimé an interesting character or an engaging narrator. It just makes him sound like a guy writing his own hagiography, albeit one with plenty of ass-kicking and name-taking. It’s probably somewhat telling that the most memorable moment in the book happens when Fils-Aimé describes working at VH1’s Manhattan office on September 11, 2001—and getting tasked with heading up evacuation of the building in the hours after the World Trade Center attacks. It’s the rare moment he admits to being frightened and out of his element, and for a few short paragraphs, Disrupting the Game comes alive.
There are other memorable moments—Fils-Aimé has some heartfelt words about former Nintendo Co. Ltd. CEO Satoru Iwata’s untimely death and funeral, for instance—but for the most part, Disrupting the Game just recounts the same details of Fils-Aimé’s life that readers could easily glean from gaming blogs or Wikipedia—and, strangely, with a similar sort of distance. It’s entirely possible that the qualities that tend to make for successful executives—a bland aloofness, a refusal to take blame, and an eagerness to take credit—are simply antithetical to the qualities that make for compelling writers. That’s too bad, because I’m sure there’s a really interesting story behind Nintendo’s successes and failures of the last twenty years—it’s just that you won’t be getting it from Disrupting the Game.
As a businessman, Reggie Fils-Aimé has very little to prove. His successes at Nintendo of America speak for themselves—as do his successes at VH1, Procter and Gamble, Pizza Hut, and Panda Express. It’s just unfortunate that Disrupting the Game adds so little to them. It has its moments as a fun, light read, but it strikes me as less likely to end up in business school curriculum than it is to turn up in a bargain bin somewhere—presumably next to all the unsold Wii U’s.