Reggie Fils-Aimé, president and CEO of Nintendo’s American branch since 2006, announced his resignation on Thursday night. His successor: Doug Bowser, the current Sales and Marketing Director of Nintendo of America. The fact that someone with the surname Bowser should take over the CEO position at Nintendo of America did not only cause laughter among Nintendo fans.
On Twitter , many users make fun of the fact that the new CEO bears the name of Mario’s adversary. “After all these years, they just give Bowser the keys to the Mushroom Kingdom,” writes one user. Meanwhile, others point out that in a photo of Bowser in the background Mario and Luigi are tied up with a Gamecube controller.
Regardless of the strange name resemblance to which even Fils-Aimé pointed out in his farewell video, the change of CEO is not insignificant. Nintendo of America is the oldest branch of the Japanese video game company, which plays an important role especially for the import of Japanese content into the West.
Fils-Aimé, the 57-year-old American with Haitian roots, is one of the most famous faces of the video game industry, which earned him numerous nicknames, such as “Regginator”. In particular, his appearance at the E3 2004 made him famous when he said the following sentence: “My name is Reggie . I’m about kickin ‘ass, I’m about takin’ names, and we’re about makin ‘games. “
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