For many, Nintendo is a mystical place out of which fun games and interesting ideas come from time to time. Some people are die-hard fans of the company, following its every move and setting up little shrines to its corporate celebrities, whether virtual (on Geocities) or corporeal (in their bedrooms). Others despise them, usually out of a deep-seated disagreement with their products and advertising, which to many gamers represent much more than mere financial decisions. Either way, Nintendo is a company in which people in this forum have invested a lot of emotions, and I count myself among you in this.

I just spent a year and a half inside the marble edifice that is Nintendo of America, as a programmer and full employee- not a tester, holed up within a partitioned prison, excluded from the company culture- and now that I am leaving the job for other (possibly greener?) pastures, I come to you with the modest gift of the stories I can tell.

I'll try to stay away from anything confidential in this thread, as I still respect Nintendo's privacy quite a bit. I think the company is a great place to work and I have very few, if any, negative things to say about them. But I'll share some interesting things:

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(This one's probably obvious, but...)

The majority of people at Nintendo who are directly involved with games actually follow gaming news, websites, and forums very closely. (They're gaming geeks too!) They know when people are pissed off by new console colors, or when forums make fun of crappy 3rd-party releases, or when fans make petitions for games they want to get translated. It's not like all of the letters sent to Consumer Service are translated and mailed in a manila envelope to Mr. Iwata, but the company generally recognizes the fans' opinions. Unfortunately for some hardcore fans, most decisions are made for sound, researched financial reasons, and while fans can sway corporate opinions through buying products or by inspiring extensive media coverage, "we loved Kid Icarus make anooooother"-type pathos isn't really an effective arguing tactic, at least in the short term.

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Pretty much everyone at NOA I talked to about this thinks "Ninty" is the stupidest nickname ever.

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You know how Reggie Fils-Aimé, Miyamoto-san, and Iwata-san are sort of seen as dynamic, almost fictional characters in the amount of hype and respect they get in Nintendo fan communities? Yeah, well, it's like that for most of the employees too, only we have more stories to tell about them.

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You'd know this if you've ever been to Redmond, but Nintendo is completely and utterly surrounded by Microsoft. There are Microsoft buildings less than a quarter mile to the north, south, east, and west of the company's HQ. There's just one single, vacant lot to the north of NOA that Nintendo owns and Microsoft's constantly trying to buy, but Nintendo won't budge. I'm convinced it's a secret NOA command outpost.

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Nintendo is a big company, and while there are lots of people who deal directly with games everyday, such as testers, translators, writers, programmers, and artists, there are plenty of people there who don't work with games, and don't even play games. I met lots of people who didn't know anything about games, and they didn't care: they were there to research patents, or monitor credit accounts for retailers, or think of good benefits for employees, or find cheap flights for business trips. Tons of people don't give a poop about games, and just happen to work for a game company.

However, the Wii's launch changed this, and it was startling. The employee store was swamped with orders from people who never, EVER play games, and I saw people who were obviously getting their feet wet for the very first time diving into gameplaying and talking about how they never knew video games could be fun and easy to play. It was astounding- my first hint, personally, that the Wii might actually hit its marketing demographic.

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There are a few stories I would be more than happy to tell if there's any interest, though you'll have to forgive me if I like to tell them in a long-winded fashion and don't type them up immediately, as I like to sleep a lot. Some possible stories might be:

-Nintendo Power's 200th issue anniversary party and the epic trivia contest
-Nintendo company picnics and other amazing things that employees do
-Getting drunk and meeting Mr. Miyamoto, and other E3 2006 debauchery
-The day the Wii name was announced to employees

Go ahead and ask me questions if you'd like- working here has been one of the most interesting times I've ever had!

Edit: Please don't ask me questions related to legal stuff or piracy; I have no friggin' idea, and I wouldn't want to involve myself if I did. Consult this page for those kind of questions.

Hmmm... I didn't do too much related to actual game development, but when I first arrived at Nintendo I was basically given a DS devkit, all of our documentation, and told "make a game. Something fun. Whatever you want." That was crazy; I had no idea what to make, and I'd never programmed anything outside of a PC before (unless you count programming BASIC on a TI-83). So I made a neat little application to practice programming the touchscreen; it was an 8x8 Picross game, and I used lots of NES sprites for the puzzles. But this was just a little demo that I made; nothing that would've ever been released to anyone, anywhere.

And thanks for the advice; I don't feel like I was too close to actual development to know many secrets, but as I still want NOA to like me, I plan to be prudent.




The actual work was great. The corporate environment is very laid-back, everyone's genuinely nice and happy, and all of the work was at gratifying, if not always "fun." I didn't really influence design decisions much; most game design is done in Japan, where EAD's games are made. The job was extremely varied, though, and I found myself going outside my job description often, which made it very fun.

I'm going to try to stay at least... "parallel" to the industry. Games are too much of my life to just give them up and be a database programmer or something lame.

Indeed... Nintendo saw a lot of backlash and little praise for their naming at first, and though NOA marketing insisted it would grow on people, as I recall, few fans believed them. I never thought the backlash would influence a renaming... not because I saw the "master plan" and knew that yes, eventually, the fan community would accept it after all, but really because I knew that a lot of research and time had been spent on that name and I felt that ultimately, the qualities of the system were going to overshadow what anyone thought of the name anyway. That was my own opinion, at least.

It's surreal to see myself write this now, but I feel like the naming was a pretty decent one, after all is said and done. Then again, maybe it could've been named "Poopsax" and everyone would still love it just as much as they do now.

My First and Last E3

I almost didn't go to E3. Lots of Nintendo employees end up going, and for many it's almost like a bizarre, three-day costume party: employees from departments all over the company assume E3-specific roles that have nothing to do with their normal jobs. I know techies who became line bouncers, translators who became interpreters for meetings (okay, I guess that isn't too weird), hiring managers who became boothbabes... for most people who go, it's a very big deviation from the norm, and a bit of a vacation, even if you have to work for most of the convention and can only really see non-Nintendo stuff on your short lunchbreak.

So I almost didn't get to go, being a "junior" ( ) employee, but our group ended up needing some extra help, so I got shipped out with only a day or two of advance notice. I was ecstatic.

E3 was great; I got to work at the Developer Relations booth, meeting and talking about programming with currently licensed game developers, and talking about Nintendo with loads of aspiring developers, as well. E3 2006 was a fantastic time for Nintendo, as I'm sure anyone who went could plainly see. I got up super-early everyday so that I could arrive an hour before the show and play the Wii games on display... I still can't wait for Super Mario Galaxy! So anyway, good times were to be had.

I got to sit in on a screening of Madden '07 Wii for Jeff Bezos and Robin Williams, and they wrecked house in the game. I've never seen anyone get a touchdown as quickly as Robin Williams did; it was like there was only one team on the field. This made the EA guys very happy.

On the night after Nintendo's epic keynote (did anyone refer to it as a Wiinote back then? ugh...), which I got to attend in person, Nintendo held a big party for lots of celebrities and cool people, which I believe was covered a little bit in the press.

This party was posh. I guess a lot of parties that companies throw for press/celebrities are like that, but I'd never been to one, so I was floored by the yummy desserts and great service. They had an ice sculpture in the shape of the Nintendo racetrack logo, and it dispensed blue martinis. Suffice to say, I and a fellow engineer got loaded, along with many other folks in attendance, and we sat back down at our table to discuss video games and E3 sightings.

And then, who did we see but Miyamoto-san and the awesomely dressed Ashura-san, sitting a couple of tables down, eating dinner while Japanese businessmen (probably from other game companies) periodically came by and introduced themselves.

We decided that it was then or never (we were so nervous), and, with the courage that the azure spirits had bestowed us, we walked over to Miyamoto-san's table and introduced ourselves. I bowed very low and offered him my business card, introducing myself and telling him it was an honor in Japanese. We spoke about what I did for Nintendo, and where I'd studied Japanese (in college in D.C.), and about how nice a city D.C. is with its free museums and tons of interesting stuff to do all over. It was a relatively short, but awesome, conversation, and they both seemed so friendly and humble that it was... well, humbling. Oh, and I got Miyamoto-san's business card, now the shining star of my collection. Score!

Oh, and the next day, Donkey Lips from Salute Your Shorts stopped by where I was working to say hi. E3 rocked.

Edit: Oops, wrote "Sunshine" instead of "Galaxy." I still think Sunshine is an awesome game, though. No matter what y'all say.

There was so much cool junk it would make your head spin. Some of it fell into my possession (like I inherited it), though I passed it on to other employees when I left. Other stuff just happened to show up in occasional sales the store would have or whatnot. Here are some cool things that I happened to see/touch while I was there:

-A Nickelodeon Kid's Choice Award (kaleidoscopic blimp!)
-An original NES programming manual
-A life-size (I guess?) statue of Pikachu
-Prototype cartridges for unreleased NES games
-Unreleased controller prototypes
-Other stuff I can't think of at the moment

I think a lot of people at Nintendo are pack rats, and there's so much cool Nintendo-themed stuff that a lot of it sticks around for decades.

Since I'm still thinking of the best way to write the story about the day Wii was named, I'll share a little about the company picnics.

Every summer, NOA has a company-wide picnic out at a ginormous field in BFE, Washington, and pretty much all of the employees make the trek out there for a day of activities and fun. I found a website with some pretty good pictures (way better than I ever took) here. There are even pictures of muddy Perrin Kaplan!

The picnics are fun because they offer lots of crazy stuff, like rock climbing walls, free massages, horrendous live bands, epic hackysack circles, go-kart races and an all-you-can-drink beergarden! It's really a rather kid-oriented event, though, as the average age of the company is older than you'd expect, and it seems like a good majority of the employees have kids they bring to have fun.

At the last picnic, toy bags were being handed out to children at the front gate, and my girlfriend and I managed to convince the guys handing them out that we should get some, too. In addition to lots of other random, non-Nintendoey toys, there were Mario-themed noisemakers! I now have two little plastic clamshells that, when a button on them is pressed, emit the sound that it makes when Mario gets a mushroom and sound it makes when he swims underwater, respectively. I will treasure these always.

At random times during the year, Nintendo employees get awesome "mini-bonuses" that make the job undeniably kick other jobs' asses. When Nintendogs came out, every employee got a free copy, for example. Regular lotteries are held for things like spare Nintendo-themed neon signs (great for home bars!) and other goods. This is, of course, stuff that the company can probably give away cheaply and easily, but it definitely serves to make a lot of people's time at the company better. I'll bet all companies wish that employees loved their products so much.

April 27, 2006: WiiDay

With the exception of a privileged few, most people at NOA learned of the name "Wii" at the same time as the rest of the internet. It's really the sort of secret that's so juicy that a company of 1000+ people could never keep it under wraps for more than a day if they all knew- it would've slipped almost instantly from the weakest link in the chain, and then the whole internet would know in minutes. So we were pretty much left in the dark, though I think a lot of us knew a name change was coming eventually, since Nintendo rarely (if ever) sticks with their codenames for consoles.

Project Reality, Dolphin, Nitro, and then, Revolution... Nintendo often has what I would consider to be pretty darn cool console codenames. And people who work with the system early can get very jazzed about the codenames, so much that they take them for granted. For an example, let us delve into the world of the Nintendo GameCube, formally known as Dolphin. The codenames don't just stop with the name of the console: Gekko, Splash, Flipper; it's a theme! Nintendo tends to be clever like that (not that other companies don't), and it's one more reason that employees could easily fall in love with codenames before a system is released. So I admit that I (among some coworkers) was hoping against all logic that the Revolution name would stick, 'cause I thought it was pretty badass.

And then came the fateful day.


Hamburglar posted:
I picture either mass chaos, with cubicles being turned over and set on fire, or just a bunch of people saying "yes that name is wonderful".


This made me laugh very hard. Well, without describing everyone at the company's reactions (as I only observed the reactions my direct co-workers), let me just detail my own day on that fateful April 27th. I speak only for myself here, not for the company on the whole. I can quite honestly say that I had friends at Nintendo who just shrugged and said "oh, that name is just fine; besides, the name doesn't matter as much as the system's capabilities." But that was not my own reaction.

I strolled into work, more or less on time for a day of doing technically awesome work. As I passed by the employee store, still a little groggy from having woken up literally minutes earlier, my friend who worked there called me over. "Hey, did you hear? They renamed the Revolution. It's the 'Wii' now. Ha!"

I gave him a strange look and just kept walking to my cubicle. "The WHAT?" I thought. "That's ridiculous. Why would he tell me something like that? That's a very stupid joke." I settled down to the internet, my glowing bastion on knowledge, to set things straight.

And it was all over the place. Wii. Wii. Wii. Wii. WHOOOOOOA. I spent most of the rest of the day trying to deduce why Nintendo had done this. The name made no sense, and it meant "urine" and "penis" to boot! I explained this fact to one of my Japanese colleagues, who had previously had no problem with the name but had now changed his mind a bit. We thought that maybe it was still a late April Fool's joke or something.

But I soon realized that this wasn't going to change. I got mad. I wrote an angry post on Slashdot Japan explaining to them what "Wii" means phonetically in English, and why it's already receiving a large backlash in America. (I was marked "informative!") No desks were overturned and no devkits were set alight in effigy, though there was a lot of general grumbling. One translator ran up and down the aisles yelling "Wiiiiiiiiiiiiii!" It was a bit more chaotic than most days, and not very productive at all; half of the company was on internet forums for most of the day.

I browsed forums checking out people's reactions (they were about 99% bad), and it was gratifying to see that people agreed with me, by and large. I hypothesized that maybe Nintendo would reconsider the name change once enough people weighed in with their opinions... but as I explained earlier, I quickly shot this idea down myself. Even if I didn't know what Nintendo was doing with this name change, I was somewhat confident that the namers (marketing and the folks back in Japan) had a much better idea than I had. At least, I hoped so.

I felt down about it a little bit, and I said that I would never call it the "Wii;" it would always be the "Revolution" for me. Some of my co-workers thought that was extreme. Some of them rather liked the name, though on that first day I thought they were madmen.

And then, as we kept hearing it and seeing it and talking about it at E3 and everything, it slowly stuck. I didn't want it to, but it did. And then, I started liking it. My attitude when describing it to people had originally been "I think this is a dumb name, but the system's really cool." It was now "hey, this is a really weird name, but it's also a really weird system, and you're going to LOVE it."

So I guess you can say that I more or less went Denial -> Anger -> Bargaining -> Depression -> Acceptance, as predicted by . I think my reaction to the "Wii" name was more a regret of the loss of "Revolution" than an absolute disgust with Wii," and this factor didn't even matter for most Wii consumers, who probably hadn't even heard of the name "Revolution."

But in my heart, "Revolution" is the most appropriate codename I feel Nintendo has ever had for a console relative to the system's goal in the market, and its memory will live on among gamers for a long time.

it's not somethingawefull lol. That's quite a misspelling lol

at least it's coherent unlike *cough, cough * Talisin

You'd know this if you've ever been to Redmond, but Nintendo is completely and utterly surrounded by Microsoft. There are Microsoft buildings less than a quarter mile to the north, south, east, and west of the company's HQ. There's just one single, vacant lot to the north of NOA that Nintendo owns and Microsoft's constantly trying to buy, but Nintendo won't budge. I'm convinced it's a secret NOA command outpost.